[Xitami] Robustness?

[Paul Reid]

With that rig, you may be limited by your 128K wire. But if you
are just serving basic pages, I think both your wire and your CPU
are over-kill. 

I had Xitami running on a 386SX-16 w/4 Megs. Single surfers
outside the building could NOT tell that it was a very lame
server; some commented that it seemed fast. Inside the building I
could feel a slight hesitation compared to my Pentium server  but
not much. 

Your P-333 is 40 times the power of that 386SX-16. 

When my main server was P-133 with 32 Megs RAM, one web-page
suddenly "took off". Up to 300 hits per day on a page with 27
images and a counter, on top of 200+ hits per day on the main
pages. (The "hot page" had an image of a woman in a shirt open to
her navel, but "nothing showing".... go figure.)

While I did not do a detailed analysis of the logs, I'm sure
there were simultaneous surfers. It held up just fine. When I
happened to be watching the CPU Utilization meter, it generally
sat at 2% with 1-second bursts that were higher, no sustained CPU
load. 

Likewise, even with 32M, the hard drive sat quietly, most data
cached in RAM. So quiet that when someone was sitting next to it
and I remotely started sucking the whole website down for
back-up, that person commented on the unusual racket. 

I've since moved it to a P-350 and 128M, and added Streaming
Media server to it, and that is fine and snappy even with many
hits a day. 

OK, here's my main server's stats at this moment: 

 HTTP service started at 20/Sep/2001 (*)
 Highest open connections:  25
 Total number of hits:  170260
 Total data transferred  2215Mb

(*) Last re-boot after move to new hardware... For a Windows App,
Xitami is mighty robust!

In your situation, I'd worry about the DSL. Is it really 24/7, or
more like 23.9/6.9 ? In my situation, hard-wired on the campus of
a large university, most of my server "outages" have not been my
server but the campus network. Router malfunction, 4 hours; DoS
storm, 2 days; and the power was out for a week while they
upgraded power transformers. You may be better served by a
commercial host, which should have better control of their link
to the Internet and their power needs. But, do-it-yourself can
work fine too. 

 -PRR