Re: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform

["Jim Franz" <franz400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe - I understand your calcs of what a T3 can handle, and the math does
help,  but the reality of a web site is not sessions, hits, or visitors
spread evenly over an hour. I've had a DOS attack over a period of hours,
but it was the short bursts of increased activity that killed us (not the
400-the NT firewall died and rebooted).

Andrew - it would be clearer if you state whether the 3200 per seconds is
new visits/sessions? or hits?
Is this actual traffic history or a calculation?

And all of this will be relative to the speed of the application responding
to the requests.
imho-Without a detailed analysis of all aspects of these transactions, the
whole "round trip" from browser to server and back to browser , we are just
pis**ng on the fire. (But what an interesting fire!)
jim franz

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 12:17 PM
Subject: RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform


> 1,000,000 in an hour is less 300 per second, so that's perhaps a
reasonable
> number.  Your page is over 12KB without graphics, so that's still
> 30MBit/sec, but dual T3s will handle that load.  But there's a big
> difference between 30 per second, 300 per second and 3000 per second.
> There's also a big difference between new (non-cached) visitors and repeat
> visitors.
>
> When we talk about how much load the iSeries can handle, these numbers are
> crucial.  Being off by a factor of 10 when discussing the fate of the box
is
> not the best way to keep the box around.  Web application serving is a
more
> complex issue than it seems at first blush, but in the end the real
limiting
> factor is likely to be your Internet bandwidth.  Given a dedicated T3 line
> and a typical 10-15KB page, there is an upper limit of 450 new visitors
per
> second.  Period.
>
> The majority of companies don't run on a T3, I think (at >US$10K/month,
it's
> pretty expensive).  Running on a T1 connection, you are going to be
limited
> to no more than 15 new page requests per second.  That's it.
>
> So trying to figure out whether a given computer can handle 1000 requests
> per second is sort of like figuring out whether it can handle 10,000
> simultaneous users.  Interesting to know, but hardly relevant to the
> majority of customers.
>
> Joe
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
> > [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Andrew Borts
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 10:48 AM
> > To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> > Subject: RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform
> >
> >
> > OK in my defense.  I didn't drop the thing - the company did.  I
> > could argue
> > many of these things to the people signing my paychecks, but part of the
> > AS/400 is a perception one, one never defended by IBM, only by us.
> > 3200 per second is a calculation from one of my E-mails of what is being
> > sent out.  The site needs to respond to 3200 people per second
> > successfully.
> > One of our partners is sending 1 million e-mails out with the
> > word free (our
> > web site - www.myfreeitems.com ) they serve millions of visitors per
day -
> > they have the consummate NT farm, and there stuff doesn't sweat.
> > These are
> > the people that do GroupLotto.com - they partnered with us to do
> > grouplottofreeitems.com - my experience with each of these
> > E-mails with the
> > word free is 25% of them go to the site within an hour of receiving the
> > E-mail.  If 25% to 50% come to the site (1,000,000) within an hour then
> > we're looking @ some serious traffic.  The AS/400's are hooked into a
> > facility with Dual T3's heading @ them, so they have bandwidth @ their
> > disposal.  Akami technologies caches all of our graphics - so the
> > only thing
> > the system is doing is html.
>
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