Don't overlook hardware options when optimizing your Drupal website. Flash storage and the latest Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs put your site on steroids.

1. Server Hardware for Drupal
Christoph Weber
High Performance Computing Manager
Burnham Institute for Medical Research

2. Two of our
clusters
304 / 104 cores
9.8 TB / 2.7 TB RAID
608 / 208 GB RAM
performance tuned

3. One of my job perks:
Follow hardware trends

4. Drupal
PHP
MySQL
Apache
Linux
Server Hardware

5. New, ugly buzzword:
Server physicalization

6. 2009 performance news
Intel Nehalem CPU
Flash storage

7. Intel
Nehalem
Xeon 5500

8. Intel
Nehalem
Xeon 5500
QuickPath
Interconnect

9. Intel
Nehalem
Xeon 5500
QuickPath
Interconnect
On-chip memory
controller

10. Upshot: 2x performance
for file and web servers

11. The Big Problem: Latency
ns μs ms

12. The Big Problem: Latency
Hard drives
RAM
CPU
ns μs ms

13. The Big Problem: Latency
mysqld
Hard drives
RAM
CPU
ns μs ms

14. The Big Problem: Latency
Caching: mysqld
memcached
Hard drives
varnish
RAM
CPU
ns μs ms

15. The Big Problem: Latency
persistent
Caching: mysqld
memcached
Hard drives
varnish
RAM
CPU
ns μs ms

16. The Big Problem: Latency
not persistent persistent
Caching: mysqld
memcached
Hard drives
varnish
RAM
CPU
ns μs ms

17. The Big Problem: Latency
ns µs ms

18. The Big Problem: Latency
Hard drives
RAM
CPU
ns µs ms

19. CPU
ns
RAM
µs
Solid State Disk
ms
The Big Problem: Latency
Hard drives

20. CPU
ns
RAM
µs
PCI Flash
Solid State Disk
ms
The Big Problem: Latency
Hard drives

21. The Big Problem: Latency
all persistent
Solid State Disk
Hard drives
PCI Flash
RAM
CPU
ns µs ms

22. PCI Flash Performance
depending on model:
26 - 50 µs latency
71,000 - 185,000 IOPS
500 - 1400 MB/s write speed
compare 15,000 rpm disk:
2 ms latency, 150 IOPS, 1 MB/s (random), 50 MB/s
sequential

23. Drupal Performance (expected)
unoptimized Drupal (100 database hits per page view):
710 - 1850 page views / s
optimized Drupal (5 database hits per page view):
14,200 - 37,000 page views /s

24. wine.com

25. myspace.com

26. myspace.com
15k rpm SAS drives (x10)

27. Architecture for high volume

28. Webserver using Flash

29. Webserver using Flash
2x quad core
Nehalem
24 GB RAM
2x 80GB
ioDrive
Server

30. Webserver using Flash
2x quad core
Nehalem Varnish
httpd
24 GB RAM memcached
2x 80GB
ioDrive
Server

31. Webserver using Flash
2x quad core
Nehalem Varnish
httpd
24 GB RAM memcached
2x 80GB MySQL
ioDrive Pressflow
Server

32. Architecture using Flash
Warning: Not proven with Drupal in practice yet!
lots of httpd threads
Pressflow / Varnish / memcached
MySQL and Drupal file tree on ioDrives

33. Cost: Cloud
necessary horizontal scaling dramatically increases
cloud hosting cost
AWS: $1400 - $6608 / month, depending on setup
no startup costs
scale on demand, up or down

34. Cost: Physical Server
$10,000 upfront for server
$1000 / month for managed hosting
twice the price for redundancy
you are committed, regardless of your future success,
or lack thereof
scale up possible, but slow

35. Cost comparison
Cloud: $17,280 - $79,200 / year
Physical server: $15,333 - 30,666 / year

36. Your laptop on steroids
Intel X25M G2
perhaps other brand with Indilinx controller
(Patriot Torqx, Corsair Extreme, OZC Vertex, etc.)
don’t try anything cheap!
~ $500 / 160 GB or
~ $400 / 128 GB

37. The Big Problem: Latency
ns µs ms

38. The Big Problem: Latency
65/85 µs r/w
750 IOPS
10 ms w
Solid State Disk
66 IOPS
Hard drives
PCI Flash
RAM
CPU
ns µs ms

40. Demo:
Firefox startup, lots of tabs

41. Thank You
christoph@dialogconsulting.biz
drupal.org/user/281751
groups.drupal.org/user/24950
facebook.com/cwebersd
linkedin.com/in/christophweber