Originally my site had 1 mysql server and 2 servers clustered for http connected by tcp/ip cross mounting NFS. Now I am running out of disk space / bandwidth and the NFS mounts began to fail due to congestion so I placed an order for a private rack, here is the config I just recieved.

2x P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 1x400GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
1x P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 2x80GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
1x Dual Xeon 3.2 - 2 GB RAM - 5x400GB HDD RAID 5 - 32 bit RHE 4

My question is what would be the best way to configure these servers and how is the server with the raid mounted on the other servers, since I had problems with NFS mounts, is there another solution? The site is a free photos and gets heavy volume of uploads/downloads of photos and relies heavily on imagemagick to process the files (create thumbnails, previews, rotate image) The photos on average are 3MB. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

that the use for this 3 servers:
2x P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 1x400GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
1x P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 2x80GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4

2 webservers..and the other?

the 4th is RAID

P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 1x400GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 1x400GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
P4 2.4 - 1 GB RAM - 2x80GB HDD - 32 bit RHE 4
Dual Xeon 3.2 - 2 GB RAM - 5x400GB HDD RAID 5 - 32 bit RHE 4

This post is a little old but I was just browsing and thought I might add some comments.


First NFS is fine depending on how busy it is. We have one NFS server doing around 120MBps of traffic without any real problem.

If you have one central upload server you could also look at something like drdb to replicate the files to the other servers.

Finally if you do not need real time you can also use rsync to keep them in sync.

I don't know how busy you are talking about or how much data but the drdb may be a very worthwhile option to look at, maybe drdb + nfs for a few central distribution servers vs going out to all the webservers.

what the linux guy decided was the best was to have apache do the load balancing for the 2 http servers and the use rsync to keep them in sync. The 3rd server for mysql and mail. And the raid is also the upload server. It uses apache proxy mod to server up the images so there is no NFS- seems to be working pretty well, we are almost done configuring.