anyone ???

To be perfectly honest i don't believe there is anyone here that has EVER seen 200 people online let alone 500.

Dolphin is a beast. The load average you are seeing is most likely useless. You would have to be looking at it while those 20 people are online. You have also not mentioned memory.

That processor is a single core 64 bit processor. This processor was first released in 2004. It is old by todays standards. That explains the low 39.99 EUR (49.00 USD) price tag. It is a low end server.


You will want the best you can get. Quad core with lots of memory. Better yet you will want to look into servers with dual or quad on board xeon processors with up to 4 cores in each processor. The best you can get. Even then, i still believe it will not handle 500 users online at once.

@gmrm

Several times I have asked for benchmarks but unfortunately there seems to be no response from Boonex on this issue.

Luckily the performance in 7.0.1 has improved but it could be better. Things that might improve your overall performance are:

1. 1) Changing the time intervals for chat and IM (you can do this in Admin panel, Flash apps (or better replace them with alternatives)

2. Change the time someone is considered online to a higher value

3. Remove the statistics from the frontpage (and other things that take time to load, like gamezone?)

Hope this helps!

For what it's worth, I have been looking at Dolphin now for almost 2 years and still have not implemented it on my live site. Dolphin has a lot of great features and the program is improving but in my opinion not ready for the real world (as you have noticed).

7.0.1 is already a big improvement on 7.0.0 but I do not see any further performance optimization for 7.0.2 and expect that this is not going to improve in the near future. So, if you're serious about Dolphin you most likely have to look at which modules you're going to use (also which pages make use of these modules) and how much CPU power these consume.

Let us know how you get on with your testing

I agree, 7.0.1 is still in beta & not ready for a commercial site, some of us have been waiting years to go live.

Andrew posted this in a blog post reply 2 weeks ago.

In just a few days we plan to bring some interesting news both on Dolphin and Trident projects that will only run in Premium Forums. We will, however change the "Access to Trident Blog" to "Access to Trident Info", since for the most part Trident project will be discussed in Premium forum.

To say that there is not much in the way of performance will not be addressed in 7.0.2 is not certain, in absence of some Boonex staff programmers missing from Trac over the last month, may have them working on just that, to be added to June release of 7.0.2.

Trident was due to be released last March, it claims to be able to hold Millions upon Millions of members, with D7 being a bridge to Trident.

We hope that Andrew will give us the "Interesting News on Dolphin & Trident" yesterday as just a few days have well passed.

You do what all the big boys do. Facebook, myspace and all of the large networks don't run with just one server. They cluster.

Dolphin has features that eat a lot of cpu cycles. All of the multi media features, the fact that it checks for online status and other things to handle things like popup messages as friends log on, im messages, ect at a rate of 1-2 seconds for each person logged in is also a factor that eats cpu cycles. Thus this software does require more power than most standard websites that don't do that.

The only thing i am saying is i do not know what dolphin can handle per server, and i do not know of any dolphin admins that are running sites that large. But i am not saying it can't do it.

we currently have a dedictaed server with 1and1 that we pay £39.99 a month and here are the specs :-

i went and looked at 1and1.com to see what kind of dedicated server  you can get for $39.95 a month

it does appear that for the price you mention here, you are running on the VPSII

512mb RAM

2GB Burstable

so we look up what Burstable Ram actually means here:

What do you mean by ‘burst RAM’?

Bursting means that while you are always guaranteed a certain amount of system resources, far more is available on each box than simply these guarantees. Hence, should you require your loads to spike higher than your guarantees, as long as the resources are available on the box at that time, you can use them, up to your ‘burst’ level.

The burst allotment is not the same thing as your resource guarantee. You cannot count on constant, sustained utilization of your burst resources. If your VPS constantly requires greater resources than your package guarantees, then you must upgrade to the higher VPS or Dedicated server plan.

ok so this is a vps, which is probably way oversold. you do have a dedicated IP, but this server is not a dedicated server for $39.95, i wouldnt suspect.

So yes, the problem would be with this server, it does say you have 2GB burstable, which means you could at any point utilize 2GB RAM, but even then, this processor is not enough to carry the load you are looking to put on it. so it does say how much RAM  you have available and guaranteed, but does not mention how much of this single-core process you have been allocated.

that is neither here nor there, your inquiry is what do  you need to provide access to minimum 200 concurrent users. now you didnt mention if you were looking to have these 200 users on AV Chat or not, you just mention 200 users on the site. so we will take it from there.

a couple of options here.

we will look at standard quad-core Xeons X3460 2.8GHz

8GB Ram

Dual 1000GB Drives

$385.00/month * 4 plus 2 Load Balancers, plus 2 NAS for file storage. now this does not take into account any backup solutions.

So lets analyze the equipment

Enterprise R16 £1,495.00 --> $1851.00USD * 2 on this why two you might ask, this is a piece of electronic equipment  prone to go down at any given time, without much warning in some cases. so you have to have one to fall back on.

NAS

Dell NX4 is an exceptionally flexible, enterprise-class file storage solution that can save time and lower costs in mixed Windows^® and Linux^® /UNIX^TM environments

The new solid state drives are part of a major upgrade of Dell's EqualLogic iSCSI storage line, which the company acquired a year ago.

The flash drives are a particularly interesting offering. At $25,000 for eight 50GB drives, with chassis, dual controllers and software, and $35,000 for 16 SSDs, the $43.75 to $62.50 per gigabyte is well below the $200 to $300 per GB that competitive enterprise solid state offerings typically cost.

So this is cutting edge technology and this price was released March 2009, so it would be a little more affordable i would think now.

ok so on this, its up to you but again, you need two of these, and you need the diskspace to match, these are as much part of your redundancy as they are your primary file server.

$35,000.00 * 2 --> $70,000.00

Ok, now we have the load balancers, the NAS, and four quad-core Xeon, which are truthfully, not top of the line equipment, but this will get you going, and you are not forking out the cash to purchase these machines. you will need to purchase the load balancers and NAS, since neither of these use bandwidth, their shouldnt be an upcharge on your bandwidth for these appliances, but you will see a cost for racking them up, plus a cost for electrical and if that is redundant and/or backup electric.

$75k in purchases, then $1540.00/month.

now this was from one glance. so you need to know what you want, and you need to know what you can spend.

think of this as wanting to get into drag racing. now we can always get in grandmas impala and burn up a 23 sec 1/4 mile, but if we want to get in the low 10's we are going to have to drop some cash on our rod. so a server setup, or network configuration is very much like building a winning race car, consider it a drag race, oval, road course, or endurance race. you dont win races with faulty equipment, and you dont have websites with millions of users with faulty or subpar equipment.

now this was not all put together to scare  you, these are round about numbers and they can be jostled.

went over and looked at softlayer, and of course you are able to customize there coming up with $26k/month there.

so as you can see, not only is this time consuming pulling this data together, it is costly to set it up, and then to maintain it.

Regards,

DosDawg

Wow Dos Dawg!

I think you just scared the hell out of everyone! Thats funny shit!

We'll I guess you call them like you see them.

Ok, so this question may or may not be in topic, but since I have only been here 6 months, Does the d6 use a lot less power than d7?

If the d6 has most of the features that d7 has it might be worth it for me to go with d6 on the next  Site.

I dont mind having the dedicated server, thats fine if it will supply the usage needed, but if d7 is that much of a hog, then its time to rethink things on my part.

Any suggestions on that?

Derrick

I personally would stick with D6 for the moment. I run both a D6 and a D7 website and looking at the logs, the D6 uses way less resources than the D7 website. Odd that the D6 website has way more users/vistors than the D7 website. Personally I view the D7 software as work in progress.

I totally agree

/DM

Hi dosdawg thanks for the information. Our server we are on at the moment is dedicated with 1gb of ram and specs as above. All i need to know is will doplhin 7 run on this spec

https://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/CloudDynamicServer;jsessi alt=14CF31E4F39AF87E29692AAFE6F11239.TCpfix155b?__frame=_top&__lf=Static&linkType=btn&linkOrigin=Home

with the 15gb of ram option and 4 cpu cores ????

Also if i purchased that package would i be able to get 200 members online at once without it affecting the server really badly ????

or this http://www.redstation.com/dedicated_servers.html