Looking for information

[Erin Clerico]

Hello Dan.

Erin from Weblogger here. You could reference our Manila server if you wish.

We do 50 to 70 thousand requests per day from our Manila server:
Win 2K, 2 gigs ram and a Pentium III 900.

Our second server works in tandem with our Frontier server. It runs
Linux/Apache and serves images, Gems and our many Manila/Static rendered
sites. It is linked to the Manila server via Samba.

At any given time there are over 3,000 websites available from our server,
at most we get a few hundred unique editors using our server to edit their
sites each day. Some of our advanced users manage their sites with Radio
Userland, minimizing resource utilization on our Manila server.

Frontier loads certain tables into ram as sites are accessed, then holds
those tables in ram for performance purposes. We allow our server to creep
up to 24,000 hits before Frontier reboots itself (we have 2 gis of ram on
our Frontier server). I monitor these events and found that Frontier is
rarely down for longer than 30 seconds.

I get flak from Unix folks about this rebooting issue. I patiently remind
them that ultimately technology is driven by customer desires, and our
customers want what Frontier offers. There are no realistic alternatives to
Frontier on any *nix systems at this time. This rebooting process is rock
solid, I have been doing it for years on my servers with very little
trouble. 

This does not mean we take this issue lightly, a heavily trafficked Frontier
server requires careful monitoring and regular maintenance to stay healthy.
Your server admins will find loads of good documentation and plenty of help
from the community to acquire the skills needed to maintain a busy Frontier
server.

On serving files and or sites from a *nix server this works well and is
recommended. It requires a Samba link to the *nix server from the Frontier
box.

Static image and Gem serving works as advertised, no problems with this
process at all.

Static rendered sites, that is sites served from another webserver as
standard .html files and managed by a Frontier/Manila server also works
well. This approach requires a bit more training of your users and a few
more hoops to jump trough when publishing pages. This allows content to be
reviewed before being released, a big plus for a public institution. Static
rendering on Manila is flexible and has many options to suit your specific
needs.

Manila is not case sensitive, but typically *nix servers are. I have had
some trouble with this on static rendered sites and found the best way to
address this issue is to remove case sensitivity from the *nix server. Here
is a pointer to a solution that works well:

http://linux.com/newsitem.phtml?sid=1&aid=11710

Feel free to have your tech folks contact me if they have further questions
about the stability of Frontier in demanding environments:
erin at weblogger.com.

Hope all this helps.


Erin Clerico
Weblogger


on 10/16/01 11:24 AM, Dan Mitchell at dan at tehipite.fhda.edu wrote:

> 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.)
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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'll take messages on the list or direct email to dan at mitchell.fhda.edu
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Dan
> 
> ____________________________________________________________________
> 
> d    a    n       m    i    t    c    h    e    l    l
> 
> Apple Distinguished Educator - Class of 2000
> 
> dan at mitchell.fhda.edu  *  http://mitchell.fhda.edu/  *  408.864.8511
> de anza college                          http://www.deanza.fhda.edu/
> ____________________________________________________________________
> 
>