Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?
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@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
UREs are probably pretty low on these SSDs, but not zero, so something else to consider, what are the chances of a URE killing your RAID 0? (now Scott will educate me that these don't matter
- seriously don't know if do or not)The failure mode that you should be afraid of isn't a URE, but data loss on power loss that is OUT of order with acknowledged writes. This breaks standard data loss recovery you get from a Journal Log on MySQL and other database apps.
If it would just cleanly loose the last write that would be fantastic, sadly it's how the Samsung consumer drives tend to recover lost data. Normally they are used in laptops that have a giant battery attached, are not running RAID (Which will see this out of order recovery as a failed drive when it fails their ECC check). This can/will catastrophically fail with multiple drives dropping on something as simple as a controller or host failure or hard reboot.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
Why not use Cloud/PaaS? There are some systems where you pay by the transaction so you're not out capital for hardware that will not scale where you need to go a long time, and you will not waste money on hardware if this project goes nowhere.
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@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
Why not use Cloud/PaaS? There are some systems where you pay by the transaction so you're not out capital for hardware that will not scale where you need to go a long time, and you will not waste money on hardware if this project goes nowhere.
Pricing out equivalent horsepower on Amazon I think came to something like $50k a month, this whole set up cost me under $10k I believe. By the time I exhaust the capabilities of this hardware/investment, I hope, I'll be at the venture capital phase and and can redeploy into a fully cloud strategy, grinning shit-eatingly at how well that original $10k investment served me.
Will also mention that colocation where I live is a dirt-effing-cheap $55-per-U/month.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
Why not use Cloud/PaaS? There are some systems where you pay by the transaction so you're not out capital for hardware that will not scale where you need to go a long time, and you will not waste money on hardware if this project goes nowhere.
Pricing out equivalent horsepower on Amazon I think came to something like $50k a month, this whole set up cost me under $10k I believe. By the time I exhaust the capabilities of this hardware/investment, I hope, I'll be at the venture capital phase and and can redeploy into a fully cloud strategy, grinning shit-eatingly at how well that original $10k investment served me.
Will also mention that colocation where I live is a dirt-effing-cheap $55-per-U/month.
There are far cheaper IaaS providers than Amazon (I assume you are looking at EC2, when you should be looking at RDS if you're doing AWS). I'm partial to Softlayer these days, but to each their own.
Deploying and managing your own infrastructure for a startup is a nightmare as if/when your product "Blows up" and goes from 100, to 100K users it will implode and crash on the weekend before you can get new hardware in and scale it, or refactor for a platform with real scalability. If your worried about cloud lock-in use abstraction systems that allow for multi-cloud strategies (although honestly in the early phase I'd just accept the lockin as that's easier to refactor than trying to refactor the platform AND scale at the same time).
If you can't maintain growth and have large hiccups in engineering VC gets spooked easily.
Also If you're really looking to scale one thing is trying to limit your dependency on RDMS in general. 9/10 times I see a startup using one, they should have used object storage or a No-SQL system.
Then again, I'm just a Palo Alto Serf working for "the man" and not feeling the wind in my hair of founding the next big thing in the garage.
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@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
Why not use Cloud/PaaS? There are some systems where you pay by the transaction so you're not out capital for hardware that will not scale where you need to go a long time, and you will not waste money on hardware if this project goes nowhere.
Pricing out equivalent horsepower on Amazon I think came to something like $50k a month, this whole set up cost me under $10k I believe. By the time I exhaust the capabilities of this hardware/investment, I hope, I'll be at the venture capital phase and and can redeploy into a fully cloud strategy, grinning shit-eatingly at how well that original $10k investment served me.
Will also mention that colocation where I live is a dirt-effing-cheap $55-per-U/month.
There are far cheaper IaaS providers than Amazon (I assume you are looking at EC2, when you should be looking at RDS if you're doing AWS). I'm partial to Softlayer these days, but to each their own.
Deploying and managing your own infrastructure for a startup is a nightmare as if/when your product "Blows up" and goes from 100, to 100K users it will implode and crash on the weekend before you can get new hardware in and scale it, or refactor for a platform with real scalability. If your worried about cloud lock-in use abstraction systems that allow for multi-cloud strategies (although honestly in the early phase I'd just accept the lockin as that's easier to refactor than trying to refactor the platform AND scale at the same time).
If you can't maintain growth and have large hiccups in engineering VC gets spooked easily.
Also If you're really looking to scale one thing is trying to limit your dependency on RDMS in general. 9/10 times I see a startup using one, they should have used object storage or a No-SQL system.
Then again, I'm just a Palo Alto Serf working for "the man" and not feeling the wind in my hair of founding the next big thing in the garage.
Thanks Dad
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Yah, you don't need consistency isn't needed and mySQL will scale like shit no matter how much you shard it.
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@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Yah, you don't need consistency isn't needed and mySQL will scale like shit no matter how much you shard it.
Really? What scale does that come into play on? Just ran a sample query against a table on my local system running MySQL w/ no tuning ( out of the box developer install -- low ram ), table has 77 million plus rows and a few simple indexes, and returns what I want in .001 seconds. I've always found MySQL to be super duper duper fast when your schema is well-designed and your queries are strategically indexed.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
MySQL is a light use database for systems that need very light relational needs. Real time systems are almost never relational so this is generally (but I don't know your use case) the wrong architecture and if you need large, high performance relational then MySQL isn't the right choice but rather PostgreSQL in the open source world or SQL Server in the closed source one.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
MySQL is a light use database for systems that need very light relational needs. Real time systems are almost never relational so this is generally (but I don't know your use case) the wrong architecture and if you need large, high performance relational then MySQL isn't the right choice but rather PostgreSQL in the open source world or SQL Server in the closed source one.
Isn't MySQL what Facebook uses for all of its realtime stuff?
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
Why not use Cloud/PaaS? There are some systems where you pay by the transaction so you're not out capital for hardware that will not scale where you need to go a long time, and you will not waste money on hardware if this project goes nowhere.
Pricing out equivalent horsepower on Amazon I think came to something like $50k a month, this whole set up cost me under $10k I believe. By the time I exhaust the capabilities of this hardware/investment, I hope, I'll be at the venture capital phase and and can redeploy into a fully cloud strategy, grinning shit-eatingly at how well that original $10k investment served me.
Will also mention that colocation where I live is a dirt-effing-cheap $55-per-U/month.
There are far cheaper IaaS providers than Amazon (I assume you are looking at EC2, when you should be looking at RDS if you're doing AWS). I'm partial to Softlayer these days, but to each their own.
Deploying and managing your own infrastructure for a startup is a nightmare as if/when your product "Blows up" and goes from 100, to 100K users it will implode and crash on the weekend before you can get new hardware in and scale it, or refactor for a platform with real scalability. If your worried about cloud lock-in use abstraction systems that allow for multi-cloud strategies (although honestly in the early phase I'd just accept the lockin as that's easier to refactor than trying to refactor the platform AND scale at the same time).
If you can't maintain growth and have large hiccups in engineering VC gets spooked easily.
Also If you're really looking to scale one thing is trying to limit your dependency on RDMS in general. 9/10 times I see a startup using one, they should have used object storage or a No-SQL system.
Then again, I'm just a Palo Alto Serf working for "the man" and not feeling the wind in my hair of founding the next big thing in the garage.
Thanks Dad
As someone architecting a high capacity real time system myself, avoiding relational and going with NoSQL systems designed for massive scale was key to our core design.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
MySQL is a light use database for systems that need very light relational needs. Real time systems are almost never relational so this is generally (but I don't know your use case) the wrong architecture and if you need large, high performance relational then MySQL isn't the right choice but rather PostgreSQL in the open source world or SQL Server in the closed source one.
I'd be more than happy to explore SQL Server if you think its performance outclasses MySQL w/ the same schemas presuming perfect indexing on both products. Wouldn't mind dropping a little more for a license. I'll look into it. Do you know of any good comparisons/benchmarks to start w/? Thanks.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Yah, you don't need consistency isn't needed and mySQL will scale like shit no matter how much you shard it.
Really? What scale does that come into play on? Just ran a sample query against a table on my local system running MySQL w/ no tuning ( out of the box developer install -- low ram ), table has 77 million plus rows and a few simple indexes, and returns what I want in .001 seconds. I've always found MySQL to be super duper duper fast when your schema is well-designed and your queries are strategically indexed.
How many nodes are you handling in how many geographic locations with how much failover? MySQL isn't designed for use in a large scale system at all, I'm not even sure how to do it. We used it at Change.org and it was a beast to keep working when other things like Cassandra blew its doors off and took far less effort.
Rows per table isn't a good indication of what will hit you when you grow. When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of users all hitting at once, load balancing, resiliency, sharding and other factors are what will determine your ability to serve requests.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
MySQL is a light use database for systems that need very light relational needs. Real time systems are almost never relational so this is generally (but I don't know your use case) the wrong architecture and if you need large, high performance relational then MySQL isn't the right choice but rather PostgreSQL in the open source world or SQL Server in the closed source one.
I'd be more than happy to explore SQL Server if you think its performance outclasses MySQL w/ the same schemas presuming perfect indexing on both products. Wouldn't mind dropping a little more for a license. I'll look into it. Do you know of any good comparisons/benchmarks to start w/? Thanks.
I would never, ever use SQL Server for something like this. I was only pointing out that in the closed source world that it is faster. PostgreSQL is a WAY better choice. But none of them seem like good choices for your project as they are all relational and relational will be a major problem.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@storageninja said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
This is where it feels to be like MySQL was a bad choice. I don't know your details, but MySQL seems at odds with all of your other requirements.
Yah, you don't need consistency isn't needed and mySQL will scale like shit no matter how much you shard it.
Really? What scale does that come into play on? Just ran a sample query against a table on my local system running MySQL w/ no tuning ( out of the box developer install -- low ram ), table has 77 million plus rows and a few simple indexes, and returns what I want in .001 seconds. I've always found MySQL to be super duper duper fast when your schema is well-designed and your queries are strategically indexed.
How many nodes are you handling in how many geographic locations with how much failover? MySQL isn't designed for use in a large scale system at all, I'm not even sure how to do it. We used it at Change.org and it was a beast to keep working when other things like Cassandra blew its doors off and took far less effort.
Rows per table isn't a good indication of what will hit you when you grow. When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of users all hitting at once, load balancing, resiliency, sharding and other factors are what will determine your ability to serve requests.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
I would never, ever use SQL Server for something like this. I was only pointing out that in the closed source world that it is faster. PostgreSQL is a WAY better choice. But none of them seem like good choices for your project as they are all relational and relational will be a major problem.
But all of my data is relational, the nature of the project is relational, I don't know how I could even do it w/ NoSQL unless I just duplicated IDs/data everywhere.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
I'd be more than happy to explore SQL Server if you think its performance outclasses MySQL w/ the same schemas presuming perfect indexing on both products. Wouldn't mind dropping a little more for a license.
That could easily double your costs, your total costs. You'll need WIndows licenses and SQL Server licenses. It would be a crazy and the cost would grow as you grew.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
I would never, ever use SQL Server for something like this. I was only pointing out that in the closed source world that it is faster. PostgreSQL is a WAY better choice. But none of them seem like good choices for your project as they are all relational and relational will be a major problem.
But all of my data is relational, the nature of the project is relational, I don't know how I could even do it w/ NoSQL unless I just duplicated IDs/data everywhere.
What about it makes it relational? Is it financial data?
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
I would never, ever use SQL Server for something like this. I was only pointing out that in the closed source world that it is faster. PostgreSQL is a WAY better choice. But none of them seem like good choices for your project as they are all relational and relational will be a major problem.
But all of my data is relational, the nature of the project is relational, I don't know how I could even do it w/ NoSQL unless I just duplicated IDs/data everywhere.
What about it makes it relational? Is it financial data?
It's people interacting w/ public web content as intermingle-able groups, having cross-pollinating conversations about it, relating each conversation, participant, tag, and content piece to each other, classifying it in personal and group contexts for future relation, and using various analytical algorithms, eventually AI, to analyze the relationships between the different data at each tier in the hierarchy and use it as a suggestion engine to expose users to new groups, conversations, content, and other users they'll like, in a nutshell.
