Best file system for a busy webserver

[Tim Daneliuk]

On 08/16/2012 01:16 PM, Paul Schmehl wrote:

>> Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Does anyone have any opinions on which file system is best for a busy
>>> webserver (7 million hits/month)?  Is anyone one system noticeably
>>> better  than any other?
>>

With only 15G of data, I'd recommend a pair of 60G SSD drives like
the OCZ Vertex IIIs (About $1/G these days) wired into a *hardware*
RAID controller setup to mirror them.  This gives you blazing speed
and reliability.  If you want to add another drive, you can make it
RAID 5 which - with the right cabinet and mounting hardware - would
give you hotswap capability.

I know people are fond of software RAID but I personally do not
consider this a very high reliability technology unless you're
running true datacenter class hardware with redundant everything
(disk, NIC, fiber ...) and that's probably overkill in this case.
Good RAID controllers are available from a number of manufacturers.
I dunno if FreeBSD supports them, but Rocket has a good reputation
(though I've never used them) as do both Adaptec and LSI.

In any case, a controller plus 3 drives would probably only set you
back in the $500-ish area which seems like a reasonable price point.

Furthermore, depending on the amount of stuff that you're serving
that is static vs. dynamic, you may get benefit from increasing
memory (thereby increasing the likelihood of a cache hit) and increasing
the minimum/threshold values for the number of httpd processing running
all the time.
-- 
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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