Two dual processor machines vs one

[Xas]

[color:"blue"] Is it worth the expense to possibly [color:"red"]improve [color:"blue"]performance and use 2 machines with Server 7 Advanced and serving the database on the web? FMP inc. claims that using one machine for the web publishing engine and the other for the 7 Server will provide the best improvement in performance. Has anyone tried this with any sukcess? It would be nice to know before I spend another 3 grand and a few days modifying the system.

[Martin Brändle]

We have such a setup where we link the two servers directly by a second Gigabit ethernet network card per server and a very short cross cable, and are very happy with the performance. At present our solution is still migrated and therefore it's not under heavy load, but we expect to have enough reserves for serving >100'000 web queries/month.

Performance can be watched with the Mac OS X Server Admin and Monitor tools of OS X Server.

However, our main reason to buy two machines was to have a redundant setup for the case where one machine might fall out.

See also this thread for performance discussion:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=144408&an=0&page=0#144408

[Xas]

Could I trouble you to tell me how I can get info on how to set up 2 G5's each with an additional gigabit card? I figure a crossover cable for the gigabit ethernet and then one machine has to publish to the net through the internal ethernet connection to the web. What kind of IP's do I assign the gigabit interfaces? The one machine to the net will have a static IP associated with the network it is on. But what kind of ip's do you assign the gigabit interfaces? Is it the 192.x.x.x scheme?

I want to put the FMPSA7 on one G5 and the FMP7 web publishing engine on the second machine.

[Ivan Tan]

if not wrong current connections restrictions means that you will not max our your machine load unless your query for a lot of data, in that case it is ram that is important not Cpu power. Raid would benefit more than cpu.

[Martin Brändle]

This might be true for the database server. For the Web Publishing server you would need the CPU power, because you want to have the data out very fast. There are several steps involved there, one is the WPE that decodes the query and then sends it to the DB server, then upon answer of the DB server generates the XML data, which is then parsed by Xerces, then XSLT transformed by Xalan and finally sent to Apache which serves the HTML.

The monitor tools of the OS X Server Admin utility do not show a large CPU load on the DB server (at least not for the moment), as you mentioned, but depending on the size of the result set more or less large CPU spikes on the WPE/Web server.

[Ivan Tan]

However the rule is if you can allocate a budget for a dual, get a dual.

All the power will be used by the operating system to run your application.

A dual is always better than single processor.

[Ivan Tan]

filemaker is recommending having 2 different machines. Let db be db and let the web server the pages or iwp. so the ideal soln would be 02 x dual processor machines.

[Martin Brändle]

That's exactly what we have.