Re: Help required on running WWW server

Jon P. Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Fri, 3 Jun 1994 18:18:35 +0100 (BST)


On Fri, 3 Jun 1994, Richard Hughes, Unix System Programmer, Liverpool John Moores Uni. wrote:
>
> Would it be possible for other people who have experience of this to share
> some of the ideas on the kind of hardware required? In particular:
> Machine type, disk space and RAM. I have already had some good ideas
> from various sources about using a SUN machine (well, the person concerned
> would say that as he works there 8-) ), which I am inclined to follow. I
> am considering a SUN IPX with 32 Meg of RAM and up to 2 Gb disc space. Would
> this suffice/be overkill?
>

Our campus info server used to be an IPX and it could easily handle the
(then) gopher based CWIS, 40-50 simulataneous browser logins and some
(then) experimental http deamons. We now use a Sparc10/52 as the info
server and this supports both gopher and HTTP CWIS interfaces, a second
HTTP server for an electronic journals project, some WAIS databases, loads
of interactive line mode browser logins, a few shell users and a whole
heap of network gateways and bits and bobs. I'd say that the IPX should
give you plenty of oompf and a bit of headroom. If you run SunOS4.1.3
instead of that nasty Solaris 2.x you'll find things might be a bit
faster (and certainly a damn sight easier to manage :-) ), but that's upto
you. A big advantage of using Suns is that they are usually one of the
platforms that alot of PD software is developed on and so things tend to
be easier to port than some of the more esoteric UNIX platforms.

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* Its not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important. *