Re: Suggestions wanted

[Ignatios Souvatzis <is%beverly.kleinbus.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 03:22:54PM -0400, John Klos wrote:
> Hello, all,
> 
> I am about to finish my upgrades for my colocated server, and I'd 
> like a few suggestions, please.
> 
> My machine is a CyberStorm PPC with a 66 mhz 68060 and two IBM 18 gig 
> 10k wide ultra SCSI drives; I am running NetBSD 1.4.2.
> 
> (one) In order to reduce thrashing, I have decided to have my root, 
> swap, and /usr/web on the first drive, and var, usr, and additional 
> swap on the second.
>       (a) is this ideal for a heavily used web server?
>       (b) can I prioritise the swap, and if so, which drive should have it?

you can: man swapctl. 

> (two) Apache, with mod_perl installed, takes about 3300k per daemon. 
> Should I limit the maximum number of connections to 40 in order to 
> keep them from thrashing swap, or can I assume that the "active" part 
> of each daemon is probably much less, and leave the maximum somewhere 
> at around 100? (I've had more than 70 spawned at a time during busy 
> web traffic, but this was before mod_perl)

you have to look. ps or top or systat vmstat is your friend. Look at the
resident size while launching test requests.

> (three) Regarding memory, I have 128 megs of 64 bit ram on the 
> CyberStorm, and I have 16 megs on the motherboard. Knowing that 
> motherboard memory is substantially slower than accelerator memory, 
> should I remove it,

you can do it by software... boot with the -n0 option.

> or can I have NetBSD use it for some other 
> purpose? I vaguely remember m68k Linux having a way that the 16 meg 
> could be used as swap.

Reminds me of an item on my TODO list: use NetBSD's memory priority
possibilities to handle this (that is, use fastest memory first).

I'd say, this really depends on the kind of workload, and you better should
do benchmarks if you really want to get the last couple of percents out of
the machine.

Kernel and disk buffers will be in the biggest memory segment, so if you want
my _guess_, use all of the memory.

Regards,
        -is