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travis
September 3rd, 2009, 12:13
... that i frequently visit, this one is fast and clean. Most of the other boards that I visit run on Vbulletin, so what's the deal here?
SirDice
September 3rd, 2009, 12:28
... that i frequently visit, this one is fast and clean. Most of the other boards that I visit run on Vbulletin, so what's the deal here?

It runs on FreeBSD ;)

On a more serious note, I think having a decent running database backend is the key.
aragon
September 3rd, 2009, 16:16
... that i frequently visit, this one is fast and clean.

It is as FreeBSD is... :)
danger@
September 3rd, 2009, 23:51
and it's run by FreeBSD people :-)

anyway....this forum is running on vBulletin too (you may have already noticed) but we probably haven't grown to a state when number of posts/threads is a limiting factor.

BTW. the forum is running on a pretty old hardware (dual 1ghz p3 with 1gig of ram) so it's pretty interesting to read your post :))
Carpetsmoker
September 4th, 2009, 00:43
There are dual core P3's?
travis
September 4th, 2009, 00:51
There are dual core P3's?

I'm pretty sure that danger@ meant dual P3's, unless I missed the boat back then.
danger@
September 4th, 2009, 08:56
that's correct :)
SirDice
September 4th, 2009, 09:03
There are dual core P3's?

No, but you can have 2 cpus.

Dual core means there are 2 cores on one die (chip).
vivek
September 4th, 2009, 15:56
Lots of settings are depends upon kernel settings like buffers, tweaking network subsystem, disk I/O, and much more. The growth rate is very impressive here at freebsd forums. I made similar suggestions to OpenBSD but no one showed any interest at IRC. I was also willing to donate no string attached vb license to them. After all almost all our Firewalling done using OpenBSD pf. It saved great amount of money of Cisco firewall gear.
CodeBlock
September 5th, 2009, 09:37
and it's run by FreeBSD people :-)

anyway....this forum is running on vBulletin too (you may have already noticed) but we probably haven't grown to a state when number of posts/threads is a limiting factor.

BTW. the forum is running on a pretty old hardware (dual 1ghz p3 with 1gig of ram) so it's pretty interesting to read your post :))

Few questions, not sure if you'll answer any/all of them, but I'm just curious:
- How much disk space does the server have?
- How much is used by the DB? (does it use MySQL, Postgre, etc)
- What backups does BSD have if forums (or any other part of the site) goes down? Is there some backup system in place?

I'm not a script kiddie, I'm just curious as to see what kind of specs run a real, popular, bsd server :). If you'd feel better to PM (or not respond at all) that's fine, I'm just curious.
vivek
September 5th, 2009, 10:43
- How much disk space does the server have?
- How much is used by the DB? (does it use MySQL, Postgre, etc)
- What backups does BSD have if forums (or any other part of the site) goes down? Is there some backup system in place?
Does it really matter? I'd say40-50MB disk space used by MySQL.
CodeBlock
September 5th, 2009, 11:06
No, it doesn't matter, I was just curious as the post said. I got in a discussion the other day about sites not having appropriate backup plans, etc, and the FreeBSD site came to mind - does it have a backup plan if the main server went down?

No, none of the questions matter, but at the same time I don't see any real reason for the information to be withheld. I'm not asking for the root password, :P.
brd@
September 7th, 2009, 02:44
Few questions, not sure if you'll answer any/all of them, but I'm just curious:
- How much disk space does the server have?
- How much is used by the DB? (does it use MySQL, Postgre, etc)
- What backups does BSD have if forums (or any other part of the site) goes down? Is there some backup system in place?

I'm not a script kiddie, I'm just curious as to see what kind of specs run a real, popular, bsd server :). If you'd feel better to PM (or not respond at all) that's fine, I'm just curious.

As the admin and the guy that provided the hardware, let me answer these questions. I'll also just mention that this was hardware I had laying around and if it failed I would order new hardware right away. :)

- ~70GB in a RAID5.
- ~104M (MySQL is required by vB).
- We use the wonderful Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) backup service that was created by Colin Percival, The FreeBSD Security Officer.
CodeBlock
September 7th, 2009, 12:03
As the admin and the guy that provided the hardware, let me answer these questions. I'll also just mention that this was hardware I had laying around and if it failed I would order new hardware right away. :)

- ~70GB in a RAID5.
- ~104M (MySQL is required by vB).
- We use the wonderful Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) backup service that was created by Colin Percival, The FreeBSD Security Officer.

Ah, interesting story about the origin of the server. Does tarsnap provide web access (i.e. if the server went down, flip a dns entry, and it the forums are live again?)

I didn't know vB only worked with MySQL... That'll teach me to ask before googling :P.
brd@
September 7th, 2009, 14:35
No, tarsnap just provides data backup. In the event of a failure I'll setup a new server and get it going again, but of course that might take a bit. Since we don't just have extra servers laying around or extra power. If we find these we put them to use in the build clusters :)
dclau
September 7th, 2009, 23:02
As the admin and the guy that provided the hardware, let me answer these questions.
...
- ~70GB in a RAID5.
- ~104M (MySQL is required by vB)
...
Is it a ZFS (Raid-Z), vinum or a geom-raid5 solution?
If it's a geom-raid5, which 'flavour' (TNG, PP or the plain one)?
Geom-raid5 left me with a bitter taste in my mouth (TNG and PP, then i just lost appetite), i guess there must be a a solid reason for the module being stuck in the 'unofficial' state. Also, raid5 never used to be the best solution for databases, but this forum delivers the spin, greatly... There must be some trick, somewhere :)
Would you please dismiss the mistery?
Eponasoft
September 8th, 2009, 00:34
There are dual core P3 processors in the form of Xeons.
DutchDaemon
September 8th, 2009, 01:23
Dual Processor, yes, Dual Core, no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#Pentium_III_Xeon

I think all Pentium 4 CPUs were single core as well.

The first Dual Core Xeon only came along in 2005 (the PIII Xeon was from 1999 ..) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#Dual-Core_Xeon
brd@
September 8th, 2009, 02:16
Is it a ZFS (Raid-Z), vinum or a geom-raid5 solution?
If it's a geom-raid5, which 'flavour' (TNG, PP or the plain one)?
Geom-raid5 left me with a bitter taste in my mouth (TNG and PP, then i just lost appetite), i guess there must be a a solid reason for the module being stuck in the 'unofficial' state. Also, raid5 never used to be the best solution for databases, but this forum delivers the spin, greatly... There must be some trick, somewhere :)
Would you please dismiss the mistery?

It is hardware based RAID-5.

The database is quite small, so RAID-5 is ok in this case.
dclau
September 8th, 2009, 11:26
It is hardware based RAID-5.
The database is quite small, so RAID-5 is ok in this case.
Thank you for explaining, have a great day everyone.
phoenix
September 8th, 2009, 20:14
Dual Processor, yes, Dual Core, no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#Pentium_III_Xeon

I think all Pentium 4 CPUs were single core as well.

The first Dual Core Xeon only came along in 2005 (the PIII Xeon was from 1999 ..) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#Dual-Core_Xeon

Pentium-D is a "dual-core" P4. "dual-core" in that it was two single-core CPUs stuck onto a single PCB to fit into a single CPU socket. There was nothing shared between the cores, and they communicated via the front-side bus.

AMD heavily derided Intel for this Multi-Chip Module format for many years. It wasn't until the Core2 Duo that Intel had a "native" dual-core CPU with shared caches and inter-core communications links.