How many accounts you hosting on your server?

[babakb]

There are a lot of variables to consider but...

- What is your server setup (cpu, memory, etc)
- How many active domains on it?
- How much monthly traffic is the server generating?

I just got a quad CPU 2.8 Xeon w/4 GB RAM and I'm hoping this will suffice to host about 325 domains. These domains right now are hosted on two P3 servers w/1 GB RAM each but the servers are having a hard time pulling the load at peak times. I hope the new server can cope.

 

[AndyReed]

I just got a quad CPU 2.8 Xeon w/4 GB RAM and I'm hoping this will suffice to host about 325 domains. These domains right now are hosted on two P3 servers w/1 GB RAM each but the servers are having a hard time pulling the load at peak times. I hope the new server can cope.

Your server should be powerful enough to sustain high traffic sites, unless you have xtreme traffic web sites

 

[brendanrtg]

As pointed out above, it really depends on the type of sites you are hosting.

We have seen a SINGLE SITE taking a Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz c/w 2GB RAM to its knees.

 

[ujr]

There are many other factors which will affect performance of a server, including subsystems, such as disk IO et al. and also configuration, how many services are running, etc etc etc.

Generally a dual xeon with 4gb ram will be able to host hundreds of small, not so busy sites. But all you need is one poorly scripted site, or some that involk intensive tasks to bring it to it's knees.

 

[othellotech]

I just got a quad CPU 2.8 Xeon w/4 GB RAM and I'm hoping this will suffice to host about 325 domains. These domains right now are hosted on two P3 servers w/1 GB RAM each but the servers are having a hard time pulling the load at peak times. I hope the new server can cope.

We've just completed a serious amount of upgrades with the shared hosting service - consolidated a number of P3's onto some shiny new Quadcore kit, raid1 for everything.

Having kept an eye on load on the older p3 1ghz servers for a while, we're managed to put the contents of 3 or 4 p3's onto each new server, and maintain a lower load despite having 3 times as many accounts on them.


Only drawback is that we're still using aboutthe same amount of power for 11 new servers than 38 old ones !

 

[nick_phost]

babakb, that should last you.

Our servers have anywere from 400-900cpanel account on them(maybe 1k 1.5k domains) and they seem to run "ok".

load average .08 to .60 (but trust me i see it go higher, maybe 10-20) One of the server was still running at (a load of)100++ but that was do to a spam issue. After (a load of)200 the server really slows down and start to die.

We run all types of cpu's but currently we like this setup..
Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz - 3.4GHz
2GB mem
(2) 250 sasII drives
using the supermicro 1u systems

about 1mbps of bandwidth is used on each server.


The final words,
- keep the load around 0 to 5 and you should be ok.
- if you have clients on the server. Change this setting, "The load average that will cause the server status to appear red (leave blank for default):" to around 10 [located in Tweak Settings]
- we currently have our billing system maxing out our server around 500 cpanel client and that seem to be a save number.


have fun..
-n

 

[bmcpanel]

One of the server was still running at (a load of)100++ but that was do to a spam issue. After (a load of)200 the server really slows down and start to die.

-n

WTF?? Your server dies at load average of 200??? Give that server a medal.

 

[nick_phost]

ya, our servers sometime(not often) take a hit. But if you witch your servers closely this should not happen.

 

[Arsenico]

We have a dual core 2.4 x 2 with 4 GB DDR.

there is more than 100 accounts and some of those has a lot of bandwith per month (between 100 to 200 GB)

Our Load averages are from 0.2 to 2 %
the 2% its only for a few minuts when a more than 4 users post in the forums or something like that.

Im winning money with the server and also i can buy a new one.

Also i have only a Dual core with 4 GB of ram only for 1 IRC and website (a costumer of mine)

and another one with radios.

Is cool, but is complicated ... sometimes you can have more than 1000 accounts small and your server never overload.
and you can have only one account.. and your server get overloaded...

Also you need to optimize everything

 

[jsnape]

There are a lot of variables to consider but...

- What is your server setup (cpu, memory, etc)
- How many active domains on it?
- How much monthly traffic is the server generating?

I just got a quad CPU 2.8 Xeon w/4 GB RAM and I'm hoping this will suffice to host about 325 domains. These domains right now are hosted on two P3 servers w/1 GB RAM each but the servers are having a hard time pulling the load at peak times. I hope the new server can cope.

It definitely won't do any worse than 2 P3's. I'd head over to webhostingtalk and run a search for "benchmark". There's a huge thread with many different systems and their benchmark results on a standardized test. I'd be interested in seeing how that P3 does. I have a P4 1.7ghz that clocks at a score of about 50. It doesn't have any websites on it. I have some dual opteron 285's and some dual xeon 5150's w/ 500 to 1000 sites on them. They run without incident. Almost to the point of complacency. And thats not good either

The one w/ most accounts:

Dual Opteron 285
6GB Corsair ECC Registered RAM
2 port 3ware 8000 series
2 500GB Hitachi SATAII RAID1
1 320 GB Backup SATAII
Tyan 3870 Mobo
Antec tower case/PS
Uses about 2.2 amps under load.

1300 domains

top - 22:47:48 up 18 days, 7:16, 2 users, load average: 0.45, 0.59, 0.63
Tasks: 185 total, 2 running, 182 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.2% us, 1.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 92.3% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 6228076k total, 6135164k used, 92912k free, 334452k buffers
Swap: 3068372k total, 128k used, 3068244k free, 4552508k cached

(Updated the kernel 18 days ago)

The Intel have almost same setup. Run well too but not the perfect price/performance ratio for my particular situation.

AMD setup (and Intel for that matter) runs perfect all the time (EVEN exim/spamassassin) and very cost effective hardware. Hardware was the result of months of study trying to get the absolute most server for the cheapest cost, with all parts working together. I built about 12 and they house what was about 25 older style Dual XEONS's that crashed every day all day for every reason in the book.

 

[babakb]

My main concern at this point is if the server can cope with about 800,000 emails hitting the server p/day. Most of those are junk and will be rejected on connection but still there might be a few hundred thousand emails coming through which might cause a high load because of spamassassin and clamav. I wasn't running spamassassin on the old P3 servers, when I tried, it brought the servers down. I'm hoping the quad cpu 2.8 w/4 GB RAM can cope with the mail!

 

[jsnape]

I doubt if that server would handle 800,000 emails a day running spamassassin. If it did, that would be all it was capable of doing. Trimmed to 300,000 but including whatever overhead was involved in refusing the other 500,000 you say would be refused before spamassassin comes out to 3.4/sec. Probably more like 1/sec off paeak and 10/sec at peak hours. I don't think spamassassin would handle that without choking during peak hours. But could be wrong.

 

[acidrider]

Thinking about using cPanel/WHM

I am thinking about getting a Quad Xeon Core 4GB mem machine with raid 1 drives.

I intend to run my own sites (not client sites), so the application and accounts would be very similar. I have 250 websites to deploy using the same CMS software.

If running a CMS like pligg or wordpress, how much (just back of the envelope type calculation) can this Quad 4GB machine handle? I would load as much of the DB as I could into memory at all times (even if I had to beef up the memory specs to 8GB).

Could this machine handle the mysql hit of 50 to 100 simultaneous connections, at the same time handle the email/DNS/web server http?

What do people see as the max simultaneous connections to their mysql on similar machines?

 

[babakb]

I doubt if that server would handle 800,000 emails a day running spamassassin. If it did, that would be all it was capable of doing. Trimmed to 300,000 but including whatever overhead was involved in refusing the other 500,000 you say would be refused before spamassassin comes out to 3.4/sec. Probably more like 1/sec off paeak and 10/sec at peak hours. I don't think spamassassin would handle that without choking during peak hours. But could be wrong.

Guess it remains to be seen. As I migrate my customer accounts over, I'm turning off e-mail catch-all and setting it to :fail: for all those accounts which ignore their default POP. By setting them to :fail: the delivery attempts are rejected on handshake so precious resources are conserved. Still, I'm sure a good number of junk mail will make it through so I need to figure out the most optimal mail scanning solution. I've been reading about ASSP and MailScanner, but I don't know how much less resource intensive they are than the standard cpnael spamassassin config..

 

[acidrider]

Guess it remains to be seen. As I migrate my customer accounts over, I'm turning off e-mail catch-all and setting it to :fail: for all those accounts which ignore their default POP. By setting them to :fail: the delivery attempts are rejected on handshake so precious resources are conserved. Still, I'm sure a good number of junk mail will make it through so I need to figure out the most optimal mail scanning solution. I've been reading about ASSP and MailScanner, but I don't know how much less resource intensive they are than the standard cpnael spamassassin config..

Can you run your emails on another server dedicated to just to e-mail? Does WHM support that type of setup? Even a smaller box would be better than opening up your site to an email spam attack, right?

 

[JamesSmith]

Having servers with 4GB memory adds stability to a busy cPanel box.

 

[bmcpanel]

Can you run your emails on another server dedicated to just to e-mail? Does WHM support that type of setup?

I would like to do this very thing with Cpanel. Email is the biggest consumer of resources on our servers (because of spam and the scripts on the server that deal with spam). If there were an option to do this... an integrated method in WHM that worked well, I would do it.

 

[JamesSmith]

I would like to do this very thing with Cpanel. Email is the biggest consumer of resources on our servers (because of spam and the scripts on the server that deal with spam). If there were an option to do this... an integrated method in WHM that worked well, I would do it.

Taking the spam filtering task off of a cPanel server is easy to do. We've recently invested in a dedicated hardware spam appliance. You point a domains MX record to the hardware appliance, its all filtered and checked and then if the message is cleared its pushed out to the relevant server. You set "mappings" and the domains added to the appliance are assigned to one of the mappings, so it knows the correct server to push the message out to.

I'm sure someone with a clear understanding of Exim could move mail onto a dedicated box or cluster of servers, I just wish cPanel would do the hard work - We're quite happy to pay extra to have this as a feature.

 

[ujr]

I would like to do this very thing with Cpanel. Email is the biggest consumer of resources on our servers (because of spam and the scripts on the server that deal with spam). If there were an option to do this... an integrated method in WHM that worked well, I would do it.

As James already pointed out, you can. You can use an appliance, another server, or even a third-party email scanning service. The one thing you need to modify is the MX records for any domains that will use the external mail server/appliance/service.

WHM also provides DNS templates, which you can easily modify to your needs, and of course, depending on your needs, so that when any new account is created, that it will automatically be set up with the proper info, rather than using Exim locally.

Just one last thing... it may be a shame to use another cpanel server, simply as a mail server... instead, just go with your favorite *nix flavor and set it up with your favorite MTA and mail scanning applications. If you need such services, there are a number of members on these boards that can do this for you and even manage it.

Anyway, I hope this sheds some light on the issue.

 

[MACscr]

I know this is an a bit dated, but i was intrigued by the conversation. Now that we starting to get into Quad cores and even Dual Quad Cores and i know we can add plenty of ram, but isnt the hard drive speeds going to really start to come into play with these these monsters? Especially with everyone running a SQL based site. What are your thoughts?