27 Feb
2006
27 Feb
'06
8:01 p.m.
One thing that has helped us not worry about taking the next step (distributed webservers, etc.) is the use of a RAID with a RAM front end. We use an Apple Xserve RAID (~$7,000, http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/). Advantages: - uses standard SATA drives so replacement drives are cheap (I mount them on the hotswappable drive carrier myself in about 5 minutes) - 512MB RAM in front of the drives, transparent to the server. Battery backup protects the data in the RAM and onboard drive write cache is off. What this means for our setup is that Drupal is nearly always doing I/O with RAM. Of course, this is dependent on your setup and use case.