When you get big and do stuff no one else does there are endless people who have never built a big application come out and say its impossible, i’m lieing etc.
http://www.thelinuxlink.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14426
I did a more in-depth case study with microsoft a while back but not sure when that will come out. But since then i’ve upgraded my web server. I’m now using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using windows x64 server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand. The system works a lot better when going over 2 million pageviews an hour. All outbound Data is being Gzipped and even than only 30% CPU usage. To clarify I have only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews. Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.
This server wasn’t originally ment to be a webserver, I just wanted to test out the new quad cores and see how they work.
May 21, 2007 at 2:06 am |
Markus it would be truly enlightening if you listed the specs for all the hardware that makes POF run.
You previously mentioned that you were spending “hundreds of thousands” of dollars on building out POF. I assume most of that went into your DB setup, but you haven’t given too many details.
May 21, 2007 at 2:25 am |
Market is to competitive for that
Most of my costs went towards my SAN. Redundency at any cost basically.
May 21, 2007 at 2:46 am |
An interesting rational. You’ve talked quite a bit about your setup over time, just rarely all at once. I don’t think you have to worry too much about the other dating sites becoming efficient all of a sudden. They have IT teams, CTOs, Directors of Network Engineering, and all that crap. Those people have to order new stuff all the time to keep their budgets high and justify their existence.
It seems a bit misleading of you to represent POF as running on a single machine. Your site is an especially database-heavy site, and you have spent literally fortune there. Your story is very interesting, but it’s not very technically interesting without all the important facts.
Thanks anyway.
May 21, 2007 at 3:31 am |
Markus, I would love to hear more about your setup. I read somewhere that you have 4 servers, HTTP, DB, Mail and Images; I want to know more about your database setup.
Cheers
May 21, 2007 at 4:22 am |
Up until christmas it was a single webserver(same as now) and 1 database server. Quad opteron with 32 gigs of ram. Basically bare bones when compared to everyone else in the industry.
In december I switched to something more advanced that would allow me to scale to 100M pageviews/day. The old system would have peaked at 30ish on the database side. But once I implimented the new system I discouvered a new way of doing things that dramatically reduced CPU load. So I can run everything on a single DB server again if need be, and sometimes do.
Every other site in the industry like americansingles, yahoo etc spends up words of a million a month on tech costs. americansingles is about 1/10th the size. They would die to know what i’m doing as it would save any one of these companies over 10 million a year.
only the paranoid survive
May 21, 2007 at 4:59 am |
You should tell them and split the 10 million
Thanks
May 21, 2007 at 5:01 am |
Thanks for detailing your server specs. I was the one who posted that thread on TheLinuxLink.net and made the comment here
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/microsoft-podcast/#comment-37691
I quoted your response also…
http://www.thelinuxlink.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14597&highlight=#14597
May 21, 2007 at 7:58 am |
Markus, its pretty difficult to take anything you say seriously when you can’t spell basic words like ‘Zeon’ and ‘discouver’ correctly.
Since when does a dual quad core ‘Zeon’ with 8gb of ram cost a ‘couple grand’. I think people would be more interested in knowing where you purchase these insanely cheap servers then actually knowing the server specs.
T-minus 60minutes until this post is deleted because I’m not stroking Markus’s ego…
May 21, 2007 at 8:42 am |
Could it be that a lot of your tech costs are being sent to Akamai instead of being internally done like some other sites? In other words, you may have only one server and Akamai/CDNs are doing the heavy lifting. Whereas the other comparable sites are doing more of the heavy lifting internally and spending less on Akamai?
I guess the metric should be the total tech cost/unique user or total tech cost/page view for a comparable site?
May 21, 2007 at 12:07 pm |
Slightly off topic but Markus Do you want valueclick CPM network on your site? If you have tried and been declined i can more than likely get you in.
May 21, 2007 at 4:51 pm |
As far as I know there isn’t a single site in the top 100 that doesn’t use a CDN. Its virtually impossible to run a major site these days without a CDN. If I took mine off the cdn load time would go to 3 or 4 seconds in australia because of all the images. All major dating sites use it and so do social networks, microsoft yahoo google etc.
Quad core prices where cut 50% a few weeks ago. The server is over kill for what i’m doing and a simple server with 2 gigs of ram and 2 daul core cpus would work just fine.
I tried valueclick, I got pissed off that I couldn’t find a easy way to disable all the flashing annoying ads and just left the network. I didn’t want to get 5 cent adware ads when I could default elsewhere and get 40-60 cents.
If got a 1 GBPS line and i’m using up about 200mb/sec thankfully the majority of my images are 2kb or i’d be in trouble.
May 21, 2007 at 11:58 pm |
[...] Upgrading servers. When you get big and do stuff no one else does there are endless people who have never built a big application come […] [...]
May 23, 2007 at 9:08 pm |
“As far as I know there isn’t a single site in the top 100 that doesn’t use a CDN. Its virtually impossible to run a major site these days without a CDN. If I took mine off the cdn load time would go to 3 or 4 seconds in australia because of all the images. All major dating sites use it and so do social networks, microsoft yahoo google etc.”
I can tell you for a fact that AmericanSingles.com doesn’t use a CDN.
May 23, 2007 at 9:24 pm |
American singles isn’t even in the top 2000 sites.
June 2, 2007 at 5:32 am |
This is slightly offtopic but what CPM network do you use at Plenty of Fish? Is it strictly Adsense?
June 27, 2007 at 11:45 pm |
I am starting a porn 2.0 website with video and images upload
And need urgent a server to run things…
I am hoping you want to help me out.
i dont know what Akamai is, can it be helpfull for me?
Don’t now what server i can best use.
Basicly i want to now everything…
Could you help me out..
August 14, 2007 at 5:16 am |
Give me a call if you are looking to deliver images and video fast and inexpensive. Chris 925 577 4463
January 31, 2008 at 12:20 am |
and why dont you use an unmetered hosting for youre foto’s and heavy data? I’snt that cheaper then CDN’s
August 27, 2008 at 4:37 pm |
why is it down markus