FTP fileserver???

wally morton wally at hotwally.com
Tue Mar 23 16:51:14 PST 2004


I’m looking for anyone who can give me some advice or their hard-won 
knowledge on setting up FreeBSD to be a high-performance FTP (or http) 
fileserver. I am involved in a project where I will probably need to 
serve between 1,000 to 20,000 files per day of about 18Mb to a variety 
of users connected at speeds ranging from DSL to (mostly) 28.8 K. Most 
of these users will download 3 files totaling 18MB (each 6 MB). So it's 
not a lot of data, but the same data is getting pumped out to many, 
many users. So that’s a daily traffic of 70-200GB transferred. Some of 
the d/ls will be relatively fast over DSL, others slow. What is the 
best way to set up FreeBSD to implement this? Just how much hardware do 
I need? I don’t want to overbuild, but I do want this server as fast 
and solid as possible. I will connect it to a T1 or better. Any 
suggestions welcomed. I was thinking this was going to be 
dual-processor system with a lot of RAM and to keep as much of the 
dataset in RAM as possible. Other ideas??Is dual CPU a waste of time? 
Kernel and config changes??? I am not a very experienced FreeBSD 
expert, but I'm no idiot either. Has no one written an article about 
this? They must have.
Please email responses to me directly as well as posting them here! I 
am -- wally at hotwally.com


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