Duncan Shannon writes: > is this not really that much bandwidth or IO? I guess if 200 units > over 1 hr dl a 4 meg file, its 800 megs over an hour, thats not all > *that* much. With those numbers, 2mbit should be enough. But be aware that if they all try to download at the same time, the downloads will be slow (approximately 1k/sec). It might be a good idea to have them randomly stagger the requests. > I need to plan hardware/bandwidth wise to make sure this process works > smoothly. Should i be looking at a dedicate box to run this? > Currently its going on our main server which has other things like > qmail, apache, and jabber servers running on it. Apache is not a great web server if you have a high number of connections. One of the main issues with Apache is that the processes tend to get very big when you add stuff like PHP to them. Building an application server into a web server is poor design. A single threaded web server such as Zeus, Boa or thttpd can handle much more traffic. With only a few hundred total clients (hopefully not all hitting it at the same second), you don't need to worry about PHP performance. What you do need to worry about is having several hundred Apache processes running while all the clients download the file at once. An alternative would be to use Apache for PHP and Boa or thttpd for the file downloads. I wrote a patch for thttpd that lets it run .php scripts natively. It runs them using CGI, so it has to fork a process off for each PHP request. The PHP performance is slow compared to Apache, but thttpd is much faster for static files. If you are interested, grab the last patch from here: http://titan.hpcs.com/thttpd/ If you want use one web server for everything and feel confident that you have a rock solid web hosting platform, then get Zeus. It will handle whatever you can throw at it and more. Zeus is by far the best web server available. You don't necessarily need a separate server, but it wouldn't hurt. Memory is going to be your main issue if you are using Apache for everything. Your requirements are pretty easy. If you have enough bandwidth so that downloads are as fast as possible and have your clients randomly stagger the connections, then Apache should work fine. -- David Phillips <david at acz.org> http://david.acz.org/ _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list