Preparing a high load web mirror setup

March 13, 2006

I spent a chunk of this weekend preparing a mirror for a high load environment. The mirror only needs to serve a couple of large video clips, but they're going to be linked from a high traffic website, so we expect a lot of (simultaneous) connections and a lot of outgoing bandwidth.

I made a generic mirror url, using a new hostname that I had to put into a new sub-zone in our DNS. Right now it has two A records, each with a five minute TTL. Each is on a different 100 Mbit/s subnet; because our subnet uplinks to the university backbone are only 100 mbit, this is the only way I can do over 100 mbit/s outbound.

The machines run lighttpd, serving just the mirrored files, with enough memory to keep the files in cache. Lighttpd is small and easy to install (nice when you're in a rush), plus as a single process server without threads or forking it can't really kill a machine no matter how many simultaneous connections it gets. (I chose lighttpd over thttpd for reasons I may go into later.)

Looking at this after writing it up, it's surprising to me how little stuff is actually involved. Hopefully this setup will work fine in practice; I'll likely find out soon.

(The setup passed stress tests, but that's not the same as having real load show up.)

Sidebar: lighttpd configuration

Lighttpd has a helpful web page on performance improvements. I turned keep-alives off; as far as I can see, keep-alives are useless for serving unrelated static files and I wanted to maximize how many simultaneous connections I could handle.

In testing, I discovered I had to increase lighttpd's server.max-fds parameter from 1024. A little thought led me to a doh moment about this: of course I needed to bump it, because every incoming connection needs two file descriptors; one for the network socket and one for the file being sent out. So with 1024 file descriptors the web server could only handle about 500 simultaneous connections.

Written on 13 March 2006.
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Last modified: Mon Mar 13 03:49:35 2006
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