Help Slashdot Test Our New Data Center

After many years of living in California, Slashdot is preparing to move to a new data center in Chicago, and we need your help. We have our new site running a dump of our database from a few days ago. You can hit it at beta.slashdot.org. Please go there, post comments, submit stories, and do whatever you do normally. Or maybe abnormally — run crawlers, write poll spamming robots or something. If you find any crazy issues, please submit them to our sourceforge tracker. If you're curious, the new system features 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

Abnormally?

[FooAtWFU]

Run abnormally? So, throw a few of these out there?

ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://beta.slashdot.org/

Weaker Databases?

[TheNinjaroach]

If you're curious, the new system features 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

I read this as "two quad-cores per webserver, and a single quad-core per database." Is this correct?

I was always under the impression that database servers needed more CPU horsepower than webservers.

Re:Weaker Databases?

[bol]

Depending on their architecture they very well be more web server bound than DB.

If they are more web server bound than DB I would suspect that they are using a high degree of server side caching to remove as much dependency on the database as possible. The DBs are also likely scaled out across the web servers and load balanced as well with possibly a distributed data set. This would require the front end web servers to do more work in querying the databases and displaying the results.

For example, a mod on the article ID may determine which database that article is stored on distributing the load evenly across N database nodes.

That combined with front end caching will give you almost unlimited scalability and is the foundation for all high traffic web sites.

Re:It runs Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

I set my Apache server to report random windows server versions so those attempting to break in will be attempting to use windows exploits against apache which hopefully have less chance of actually succeeding and/or assume it is running as a load balancer :P