vBulletin Mods

My two largest forums are on 2 servers each. What is your set up like and with how many servers?

Currently 1 server - 3GHz HT Xeon with 2GB RAM.

Not a Big-Board since we're still building, but call it a precautionary measure. We have a dedicated server which hosts one other small vB forum.

Specs:
P4 3.0 GHz
2MB Cache
64BIT HT 2GB of DDR 400 ram
Two 80GB Western Digital hard drives
Raid 1 (3ware Raid Card)
A 250GB Western Digital back up hard drive.

4x Web servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 2 X 80 GB with Raid 1
3x DB servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 8 GB Ram, 3 X 73 GB SCSI U320 10K
1x db server: dual P4 for backups
RPM with Raid 5
2x Load balancers: Dual P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb Ram

Apache/Linux
PHP 4.4.1
MySQL 4.0.24

More than 5. :)

That’s kind of where we are at. We own several large forums and host them across a rather similar setup. I can tell you, the one DB server we have tried RAID10 on is doing great! Its a Dual Xeon EM64T 3.2Ghz with 4Gb RAM and 4 x 146Gb U320 15k RPM drives. We custom compiled our kernel on that server to enable the deadline IO scheduler and it has done wonders. IOwait dropped from 60% to around 9%.

-Mat

switched to duals earlier this year....

Web server:
Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz (single processor)
2 gig RAM
36g 10k SCSI primary drive
36g 10k SCSI backup drive

MySQL server:
Pentium III Xeon, 900MHz (quad processor)
2 gig RAM
four 18g 10k SCSIs (RAID-5)

Apache 2.0.40
PHP 4.4.2
MySQL 4.1.18-std

only 1 because I don't know how to have set up multi servers for a website..

last time i looked the server specs were on the line of dual 2.8 Xeons 2 gigs of ram. (Gua)

and my new boards are sharing a server with the game they are forums for which has a spec of dual 3gig Xeons with 3 gig of ram, if anything thou, it'll be the game that forces an upgrade to the server not the forums

One dedicated server for now--7200 members, 1.5million+ posts. We've hit as many as 970 users online and haven't had any performance issues, although a majority of the guest users were Yahoo Slurp at the time. Normal activity is now about 650 members/non-members online during peak hours, still no major issues.

I did get our server configured with 3.25G of memory, which has helped. Well, that and George (aka "eva2000") having helped configure my.cnf to keep it running efficiently. :) I have four tables as InnoDB, which really cleared up the table locking problems we've had. We're running a Celeron 2.8GHz right now, which isn't ideal, but it IS working well for us, and within our budget (fueled 100% by donations).

wow , mind sharing some of the my.cnf file? ive been getting deadlocks every few days it seems and i usually only have 50-60 members online at once. and the forum is the only major site on the server with heavy database usage.

either way, im running a P4 2.8 ghz w/ HT, 1024mb ram, 120 sata single drive and it runs smoothly, just get that deadlock once in a while for some reason.

Web
Dual Xeon 2.4 GhZ
4 GB RAM
2x 80 GB 7.2K IDE HD Non-Raid

DB
Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz
4 GB RAM
4x 36 GB SCSI HD RAID 10

Table Locks are fun ;)
Except that it seems to work fine, though I am a bit concerned about CPU load on the webserver which seems to be too high - 400+ Plugins might be too much.
When this starts to cause problems i might have to go back hacking the files.

Is there a performance gain on multiple servers vs. a large multi-processor box? For example are you really better off with two dual proc boxes vs. a quad proc box? I am starting to see quad boxes going for around 450US a month. In a few more years we'll probably have quad proc dual core boxes for under 400US a month so wouldn't that be more than enough for a huge board?

68 votes with 50% of them being only 1 server. Very interesting.

Everyone's concept of the "big board" is different.