Multiple machines

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#1 Tue, 07/31/2007 - 05:22
mike

Multiple machines

hey, i have a question, on my webhosting i have 2 clients, 1 of a free account and 1 of a paid account, no real benefit in upgrades, but what my question is, would there be a performance gain or anything like that if i were to run a second machine? a friend of mine is giving me a computer he got real cheap for fixing his computer, he paid $15 for each of the 3 extra machines he got and is gonna give me one for fixing his computer, anyways, right now i run a 2.8GHz processor with 1GB ram, the machine he is giving me is 1.66GHz processor with 256MB ram i believe, anyways, would there be any benefits to this? perticularly how would it perform as a database server or dns server or mail server? and would i be able to span hosting services accross multiple machines useing virtualmin?.

Tue, 07/31/2007 - 06:40
Joe
Joe's picture

The only way to know is testing. But I'd bet the answer is "no".

Moving a database to another machine incurs a performance penalty, because of the network latency and bandwidth impact of moving from a local bus to a network bus--the difference between local RAM and network access is many orders of magnitude, and even the difference between a local disk and remote network access is probably an order of magnitude.

The most notable benefits to moving to another machine come when the database is working extremely hard and delivering few requests (e.g. really complicated searches). Again, this comes down to, "you can't know until you test", but I doubt it would be worth even testing. The secondary machine here is so small that its bound to be significantly slower than your main machine. If the main machine is overworked, then there might be some benefit to moving some work off of it (even to a smaller machine)...but I'd start with static web content first. That's something that can be put onto almost ANY box and you can expect great results. Other stuff it gets more challenging to make it a net win.

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Tue, 07/31/2007 - 07:53
mike

ok, that was very quick reply, um... how well would the second machine perform if it was a dedicated DNS server at an "offsite" location used as secondary DNS for my server, i have asked my parents and they said they would think and talk it over, but i am thinking of putting the second machine under their internet connection as a Dedicated DNS server running Slave to my current server, the benefit to me that i see of this is that when people ask for the address' of the DNS servers i can give them the 2 address', anyways, my question now regarding that is will the second machine perform at that as good as my current machine performs at its tasks, and how would running the DNS server under my parents connection affect their internet speed? I plan to eventually upgrade the second machines ram. maybe also the processor.

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