Subject: system loading
From: Chuck <chuck@sbbsnet.net>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 05:51:14 -0400

i am moving websites to new vservers to get rid of an old,and in some cases 
broken, o/s which we never wanted to start with but were forced to use due to 
requirements of some management software which is now no longer an issue. 
there are 14 vserver web guests currently with an average of 200 websites 
each.

my question refers to system loading and performance. rather than stuff 200+ 
sites into each guest, am i better off creating more guests each with only 50 
or so sites?

we are switching to gentoo64 (which we run on everything else)  web guests and 
each one will run apache2, bind, proftpd, mysql and qmail for outgoing smtp 
only.

my initial thought was to stuff as many sites as possible into each guest 
because of the duplication of support program/guest execution/process load on 
the host, but then i do not know whether apache2 may load up more severely 
than what would be if there were several more guests each with far less 
sites.

we have more than enough disk space to accomodate more guests easily and the 
host servers have 2x 1.8-2.4ghz opteron dual core processors with 12gb ram.

presently all web guests are on one 1.8ghz host machine which gets quite 
loaded but my intention is to split them among 4 of the new host machines we 
just installed with busy sites going on fastest machines.

which method would yield the best overall performance? more sites per guest or 
more guests? the 200 or so low use sites would all go on one guest most 
likely so the rest would be medium to high usage sites.

suggestions?

-- 

Chuck