[Xitami] Memory allocation

[R O]

Again, more good info.  I just saw your email address - I almost went to 
Rutgers, ended up going to Radford U in Virginia.  But I like the school 
when I visited, what, 19 years ago.  Sheesh, been a long time.

By trade I am a Network Engineer so systems, server applications, 
programming etc has always been a side thing for me but has never a focus.  
I know more than enough in the other areas to understand the big picture and 
know more than enough to get the job done.  But when it comes system and 
application optimization and understanding the gazillion intracies for 
tweaking a system I have always had to rely on the subject matter experts to 
play their role.

However, I now find myself having to be the expert of everything because the 
business I have launched is a 100% solo effort and don't have the $$$ (yet) 
to hire/contract the right people.  My money is spent on operations 
(bandwidth), applications and hardware and other business needs.  In short I 
am nervous that all my preperations simply aren't enough or that I haven't 
considered something, or optimized something properly, that will come back 
and bite me in the ass.  But at some point you have to let your kid leave 
the house right?

As far as what I am doing, no I don't think I was that guy doing the massive 
real estate gig though my business does have real estate in it.  My site is 
a head to head competitor to www.craigslist.com.  The name of the site is 
http://www.adcrow.com - I already have tons of traffic and users and 
everything is running smoothly, but some new marketing efforts are about to 
take place within the next two weeks that should increasing my exposure 100 
fold.  Everything was running fine on the P-IV 2Gb RAM system but I always 
new my hardware was a weak link in the operations so I went out go an 
enterprise class work horse.  Everything is migrated to the new server and I 
am taking this window of opportunity pay much closer attention to the 
optimization of all the applications and server performance.

In essence I have to hope everything I taught myself these last few years: 
perl/php, mysql, server apps, Windows OS (intracies), server hardware etc is 
up to par.  I know these newly acquired skills aren't up to speed as my 
networking skills are - but I keep my fingers crossed that its good enough 
for now.

Anwyay, good repsonses and very help info.  Thanks.  If you get the 
opportunity go check out the site: http://www.adcrow.com - I always welcome 
comments and criticisms and feedback from my peers.

-R

Russel P. Olinger
rolinger1 at hotmail.com





From: Paul Reid <preid at rci.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: Xitami Users General Discussion <xitami at lists.xitami.org>
To: Xitami Users General Discussion <xitami at lists.xitami.org>
Subject: Re: [Xitami] Memory allocation
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:04:40 -0400

  > let Windows determine its own virtual memory or should I just
set it 10Gb?

Ideally, if speed matters, you NEVER want to swap. Physical drives are
1,000 times slower than DRAM. If you catch it touching the drive for
swap, and speed is money, buy it more RAM. So the size of the swap space
does not matter.

You do need swap space "in case" some app goes off the rails and starts
allocating infinite memory. But a big swap space just leaves it swapping
many seconds longer before the crash. You want a small swap space so
that when the memory allocator sees it is in trouble, it has a little
headroom for its error processes. A Gig or three seems plenty. I thought
64MB was enough to make some RAM space for the error handlers to throw a
mystery message before the machine just got stuck.

  > I wish there was a way to completely dedicate, within Windows,
physical ram to specific apps.

Either it gets the memory it wants, or it doesn't. If Xitami can't get
its modest memory needs, then one of the monster svchost.exe processes
is sure to fail a malloc just about the same time, and the whole box
goes down. Either you have enough, or you don't.

  > soooo many people have said on many many occasions not to use Xitami
for production.

Who? Why? Anyway "they" also said that about Win-Apache for many years,
it was official project policy. In fact both servers seem to be more
stable than Windows, and a clean installation of Win Server O/S is the
next best thing to a stripped unix or OS/2.

Are you the guy with the enormous real-estate database? Some projects
like eBay or Amazon or WayBack are simply too much for any one machine.
Distributed and cluster work is mature stuff; fortunately I never needed
to look into it for my modest needs. You may be near that point.

   -PRR


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