Frontier-Server digest, Vol 1 #90 - 13 msgs

[John Koch]

>Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:24:31 -0700
>Subject: Looking for information
>From: Dan Mitchell <dan@mitchell.fhda.edu>
>To: Frontier-Server <Frontier-Server@userland.com>
>Reply-To: Frontier-Server@userland.com
>
>I'm trying to get my college to deploy Frontier/Manila on a widespread basis
>for faculty web sites. While there are a number of people here who are very
>enthusiastic, there are also skeptics, and we have to respond to their
>questions.
>
>Can anyone help me with hard facts about the following based on real
>experience with Frontier/Manila?
>
>     Our technical staff has heard that Frontier has memory leaks
>     and should be re-booted daily. Is this still the case, and if
>     not, what steps are you taking to avoid having to do this. (I'm
>     no help to our staff since my OS 9 server _does_ reboot daily,
>     but it doesn't handle the heavy traffic we envision.)


I have 4 Frontier/Manila servers running on G4s (one a dual 
processor). All are running on OS X 10.1. I do not reboot and they 
have been rock solid. Our university website is run on the first G4. 
A second server (course.wilkes.edu) currently has 315 sites for 
courses, faculty and staff personal pages, etc. The third has student 
sites and has just begun to get heavier use. The fourth is to be 
dedicated to serving our online courses and is also just beginning. 
Needless to say, we are very happy with Manila.

>
>     Speaking of server traffic... the other issue for our technical
>     support folks is just how much traffic/how many users a single
>     Frontier/Manila server can support. I've heard the "we serve
>     thousands of site on our machine" response before, and I believe
>     it. However, I need more concrete info to convince the techies.


We serve our main site http://www.wilkes.edu which has been divided 
into 100+ Manila sites for editorial control. In 5 days since I 
installed 10.1, this processor has served 46,000+ hits (these are 
page requests, since Apache serves the images, Gems, etc.).

>
>         How many daily clients/hits do the busiest Frontier/Manila
>         sites/servers handle? Again, I'd like to know about specific
>         sites/servers so that I can tell the tech support people that
>         "so and so handles X hits per day on X Manila sites on their
>         X server."
>
>     Finally, one suggestion from our Unix server gurus is that they
>     might want to serve the actual sites from a Unix box running
>     Apache and mirror this server from a "editor" server where our
>     editors would make the actual changes to their sites via Manila.
>     Reactions to this strategy?


I serve pages from Manila and images from Apache on the same machine. 
There are instructions for how to set up multihoming and use two IP 
numbers on one Mac OS X box to share port 80. They both serve off 
port 80 on different IP numbers. You could also do it with an 
additional Unix box.

HTH.

John

-- 

John Koch
Professor of Computer Science
Wilkes University
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766

koch@wilkes.edu  (570) 408-4838
Personal Page:   http://course.wilkes.edu/koch           
Webmaster of:    http://www.wilkes.edu