Re: VPS vs shared hosting for Xaraya

On 13/01/07, stein <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Thanks for the advice on memory. I think I'll go with what you suggested:
> start with 256 and move
> to 512mb if 256mb proves insufficient...


Excellent!

The numbers may be incorrect. They are my guesses based on what I've seen in
> a couple
> of Xaraya modules/blocks. If the numbers are incorrect, please let me know
> how to determine
> correct ones, especially if it'll help me make a better decision about
> what
> kind of hardware to run
> our sites on.


See below for more, but in short I don't think you have anything to worry
about. You could consider using a PHP cache (I use APC, but there are others
like eAccelerator) and Xaraya itself has caching (the xarCacheManager), both
of which will make a big difference. And make sure MySQL is setup properly
to cache requests...


The average concurrent users is my observations from adminstering the site
> and using
> the "Who's online" block, which shows an average of 3-5 or so logged in
> users, and 10-15
> "guests" throughout the day (work hours) though I'm sure it's a lot less
> during the night when
> we're all asleep.



'Concurrent users' in this sense partly depends on how long a user is
considered logged in. 15 mins, 30 mins...? So 2 users in a 30 minute period
will count as 2 concurrent users, but they put no load on the server.
The sense of 'concurrent user' that concerns you is: more than one user
making a request on the system at the same time and given your numbers I
don't think this is something you need worry about. Given an average request
time of 1 sec you would have to be servicing many thousands of visitors
before you started getting page timeouts for visitors.


I pulled from the average daily hits from "last seven days" section on the
> the Xaraya "Stats" module
> page www.[website].org/stats...


I stopped using the stats module as I felt more comfortable using AWStats on
the server and there was no reason to duplicate the data. Plus the stats
module will put load on the server. So, if it's all you have, use it,
otherwise let Apache/AWStats take care the logging and data.


I imagine thats the total hits per day, which I would have assumed to be
> most from working hours as that
> is when our users access the site. But looking at the by-hour breakdown,
> it
> turns out that the site has
> the greatest number hits late at night and in the wee hours of the
> morning...
>
> Are the numbers thrown off by search engine and other bots?


I don't remember if the stats module separates out the bots or not.

Final tip: setup a good robots.txt file to let the spiders know which
directories to index and which not. The URL scheme used by Xaraya can send
bots round in circles and cause unnecessary indexing.

cheers
jalal