Its been 1 year since I began using a HP ProLiant DL360 G3 as my web server to host this web site. The last server upgrade was talked about in this post. During that time I have had two fan kit fail which caused a around a week of down time. I knew it was time to decommission the aging server. The HP ProLiant DL360 G3 server had caused me issues long before it started to fail such as it doesn’t support a 64 bit operating system, limited ram slots, only supports two hard disks and the lack of processing power meant that a reverse proxy (Varnish) was a must.
My replacement server is a HP ProLiant DL380 G4. The specs for this server are as:
- 64 bit support
- 6 GB of RAM
- Two Intel Xeon CPUs clocked at 3.60GHz with hyperthreading
- Two 72 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM hard disks in a RAID 1 for the root file system
- Four 146 GB SCSI 15,000 RPM hard disks in a RAID 10 for the www and mysql data
Just like the old server I am running Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS as my operating system but this time I can install the 64 bit version. Due to the upgrade in performance I have chosen to not install varnish or any reverse proxy but simply use PHP caching. I went with APC (Alternative PHP Cache) as is maintained by PHP. I have done some basic performance testing and found that my router is more likely to freeze due to high load than my web server.