High Traffic eCommerce Site

Customer

Our customer runs a high traffic web site and needed a solutions to handle the demands put on the web server and database server. As their traffic has grown over the years, they’ve swapped out servers three times to handle the increases in demand.

Solution

Their setup today involves a fast front-end web server and a blazing fast database server with solid state hard drives.

Web Server
Dual Gulftown
12GB RAM
250GB RAID 1
Debian

Database Server
Sandy Bridge E5
32GB RAM
2 SSD Hard Drives RAID1
15K Hard Drive
Debian

The web server needed to process requests FAST so we setup a fast processor with plenty of RAM.  There isn’t a lot of IO on this server so we setup our standard enterprise grade 7K SATA drives in RAID 1 to provide adequate performance and protect against failure.  The database server needed to be even faster and have very fast drives for reading/writing all of the data.  We setup the server with a blazing fast CPU and SSD drives for the OS and database software.  We added a third drive (also very fast) for the binary log file for the database software and for storing database backups.  The server could handle the loss of the backup files and the binary log, so we didn’t need a RAID for this storage.

With this setup, customer is serving up 50 pages per second from their eCommerce store with plenty of spare capacity to handle any spikes and growth in demand.