Chris Anderson How many people should I expect to host on a 512MB machine?
Mark Pilgrim's and my blogs are hosted on the same machine, and combined get a fair amount of traffic. This currently is a 1Ghz AMD Duron processor w/512MB.
CPU and memory usage was not a problem even when my blog was dynamically generated via CGI for every request.
I'm very curious about your XML formats both for interchange and persistence. Is this documented somewhere?
The number one problem I see with a lot of the blog software out these days is the full-dynamic-page-generation stuff. This is really fairly evil as far as scalability is concerned. You've gotta render and cache that stuff. I don't like the "do it on your desktop and upload it after generation" model, I much prefer the "server has database with everything, re-render and cache only when necessary" model. I was evaluating b2 and nucleus, (I wanted a php blog, god save me) and this was a big sticking point with me, for both of them. I may give up on the php thing and just go with MT (because it's popular), but wonder if it prerenders or not.
Sigh. Or maybe just a hosted solution where it's someone else's problem. But I feel like I lose geek points for having it not on my server.
(As an aside, on my P4-1.7G machine with [not enough] 512M ram, I serve 3million pageviews/month on www.prince.org; and a lot of those pages are heavier and/or more complex than most blogs...)
Ben... I am quite happy with my implementation of dynamic caching. Only a small fraction of my potential pages get refrenced during the course of a day. And they only get rendered once on their first access after being invalidated by a change.
I guess I get my geek points elsewhere. I run my blog on a hosted solution. Where the CPU generally is 98% idle, even on a 1Ghz machine.
i know a celeron 400mhz with less than 100 megs of ram that is pumping out millions of dynamic pageviews a month. about a million requests a day. (not a million pageviews a day.)
oh yeah, running php 3.0.9. 441 days of uptime.
the banner ads (served elsewhere) are usually the last thing on the page to load.
you can do a lot more with very little than i think most people realize.
www.mysql.com does a half-million dynamic pageviews a day on a dual p3 with 1gig of ram.
Ben,
Drupal is a content mangment system that is written in PHP and lets you use cache if you want. Has a bunch of other features and is more than just a blog tool, but if you haven't checked it out before you might find it worth your time.
Note: I do use it myself and help develop it.