[Discuss] I think my server is running out of "something"

[John Abreau]

My experience is that when too many services are loaded onto the
same machine, it eventually gets too complicated to manage properly,
and ultimately it starts exhibiting bizarre glitches that are nearly
impossible to understand in enough detail to fix. From what you
describe in your original message, it sounds like your server may be
reaching that level of complexity.

The Efika MX Smarttop is supposed to draw only 5W. With the addition
of a low power USB drive, it may be able to handle your web and postfix
services, and it should still use a lot less than 140W.



On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:13 AM, David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:
> On 03/18/2012 12:45 AM, John Abreau wrote:
>> Is it completely impossible to deploy multiple servers instead of trying
>> to mash everything together onto a single machine?
>>
>> In my home network, I have a CentOS server that just does firewall/DNS/
>> DHCP, a second server for web/mail/fileserver, and a third server for backups.
>> That's in addition to my desktops, laptops, and tablet.
>>
>> I'm not running MythTV, but if I were to deploy MythTV, I'd use a dedicated
>> server that would do nothing but MythTV.
>
> Of course it's possible to do so.  But up until a few hours ago, it was
> working completely fine, rarely going below 85% idle, and burning about
> 140 watts according to my Killowat.  That's pretty damn awesome.  Two
> servers would mean almost twice the electricity draw with no real
> benefit.  Oh, and the server has an IR tranceiver on it for changing
> channels on my cable box.
>
> The MythTV capture card (PVR-350) does hardware MPEG encryption, so
> MythTV isn't really dragging things down as much as you would think
> processor-wise, though I'm sure it pounds the sata bus, though.  I only
> have one card and it's SD, so it's not like I'm trying to write out
> multiple HD files at the same time.  All the MythTV recordings go on
> drives not used for anything else.
>
> Postfix sees a lot of mail (I usually get around 200 spam messages a
> day, most of which is caught by SpamAssassin).  The web server is
> hosting about 6 domains, some of which go to one of the two wiki engines
> I have on my server, but maybe it handles 100 hits a day.
>
> So why do I need multiple servers if my CPU cores are mostly idle?
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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