[oclug] How fast is fast enough

[Sandy Harris]

Charles Sutton wrote:

> Here is a hot discussion that I have been having with an ISP.  The ISP
> is in Ottawa.  A server of theirs is extremely slow.  Especially in the
> evening hours.  They have everything running off of one server.  The
> discussion I have been having with them is that they could stand to
> upgrade the server.  Presently they run a Asus board with PII 350 and
> 256 megs of RAM(66ms).  The hard drive is IDE 8 gig.

Sounds to me like it is time to change ISPs. I'm quite happy with Storm
and hear good things about Achilles, Magma, ... You have a lot of choices. 

> Can someone confirm or suggest some ideal configurations for a ISP type
> server running Unix/Linux type OS.

I once discussed news server configuration with a senior admin at a local
ISP. It's been a couple of years and beer was flowing freely at the time,
so I may have some details wrong. As I recall, they were using a dual
Pentium (mildly obsolete at the time) maxed out to 128 megs, and running
Solaris X86. It had two DPT caching controllers each with 64 megs and
some 4 or 9 gig Barracuda (top of the line at the time) SCSI drives.
Both arrays were striped, not RAIDed, for speed. One held news articles,
the other the indexes. That machine did only news.

Of course they had separate machines for mail, web, a couple for DNS, ... 

Methinks you need separate machines if for no other reason than security.
If some bozo gets root on the web server via the latest Apache or CGI
script bug, I don't want him to get my mail. If he takes over the mail
server, I don't want him defacing my web site.