On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, John 'Warthog9' Hawley wrote:
As much ram as you can reasonably afford and fast, and large, disk. The number of cores doesn't really play as much of a roll in a normal mirror as those two factors do.
- John 'Warthog9 Hawley
On 03/27/2012 02:40 PM, Tom Perrine wrote:
Does anyone have recommendations for server hardware? Number of cores, RAM, storage?
We've got the bandwidth, I just need to know what kind of server to get...
--tep
A lot of it depends on how much traffic you want to be able to serve. If you want to be able to provide a few hundred megabits, you don't need a lot. If you want to handle kernel.org levels of traffic, you'll need something bigger. :)
Until about a year ago, my mirror was a 4-drive raid10 (of 7200rpm SATA drives) and 16GB RAM. It really doesn't take a lot.
The more traffic you can serve from RAM, the less disk throughput you need. Disk reads are *vastly* more important than writes. I would strongly recommend some level of drive redundancy, both to prevent you from needing to resync and to prevent trouble for your downstream clients.
As a slight aside, the most important bit of tuning I did was to change vm.vfs_cache_pressue (I set it to 10). This tells the kernel to keep the file metadata in RAM. It makes it so rsync doesn't have to churn the disk.
DR