[SunHELP] Webserving capabilities of an IPC/IPX

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Maarten Deen wrote:

> what kind of transferrate/hitcount would an IPC or an IPX be able to 
> sustain while serving as a webserver? It would be for serving a picture 
> archive site (no, not an xxx archive).
> Both would be fully loaded with RAM of course.

If you are doing no server side processing whatsoever and serving up only
large static data files, even a sun4c class system will easily saturate a
T1 line.  Ideally you will top out at disk speed, usually on the same
order as the built in ethernet (10Mbps).

If your files are very small or if you are doing any kind of server side
computation per request, a slow system will bog down (due to I/O
bottlenecks in the first case and CPU in the latter).  For straight
serving of 50KB and up JPEGs you will not have this problem.

This all presumes that the archive is organized sensibly (no directories
with 10000 files in them, etc) and your webserver is configured
efficiently.  A caching front end webserver, even on the same system, can
offer performance gains in some cases.

-James