The Proliferation of Linux

At this point I thought I’d take a moment to go over how this site is powered.

First off, there’s the VPS from Linode (Linode stands for Linux Node) which comes with the following specifications:

• 360MiB RAM
• 12GiB storage space
• 200GiB data transfers per month
• Full SSH access (root)
• Managed DNS
• (and more…)
• $19.95 per month (about 14€)

I’d say that that’s pretty good value for money…  So far I’ve been extremely happy with the Linode VPS, no glitches or breakdowns and it’s fairly zippy (even though I’m in Europe and the server is in the US).  Oh, and when you order a VPS you get to choose which data centre you want it to be in.

If you do decide to get a VPS from Linode, I’d appreciate it if you used my referral code:

632bae5e8fd45745396cd410c14d94771105bc6a

I’ll be honest about it: I get $20 credit if somebody gets a VPS with that code (and keeps it for 90 days)…

Well, that covers the hardware, so to speak.

As for the software, the basic setup is this:

• Varnish HTTP accelerator
• Lighttpd web server (+ PHP + MySQL)
• Wordpress MU
• Gentoo Linux

And this whole stack is using about 110MiB RAM at the moment (uptime: 10 days and still counting) and can handle about 1000 – 4500 requests per second without a glitch.  I tested the requests/per sec using ab (Apache Benchmark):

10 000 requests, 50 concurrent:

hex-vps ~ # ab -n 10000 -c 50 http://proliferationoflinux.org/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        32458 bytes

Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   2.245 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      328850000 bytes
HTML transferred:       324580000 bytes
Requests per second:    4455.28 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       11.223 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.224 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          143077.87 [Kbytes/sec] received

10 000 requests, 100 concurrent:

hex-vps ~ # ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://proliferationoflinux.org/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3

Server Software:        lighttpd/1.4.20
Server Hostname:        proliferationoflinux.org
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        32458 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.618 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      329234598 bytes
HTML transferred:       324969496 bytes
Requests per second:    1160.32 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       86.183 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.862 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          37306.32 [Kbytes/sec] received

As you can see, at least if you’ve done this before, it’s fairly impressive. For the sake of comparison, I can tell you that before I installed Varnish, the server only did about 50 requests per second.

If you have any questions about the setup, do feel free to ask.  I’ll do my best to answer…  Also if you have any suggestions or ideas, they are also welcome.

Tags: inside workings, vps

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 22:05 and is filed under Internal news, Open Source, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.