The authors of this Sun BluePrints Online paper, Deploying Web 2.0 Applications on Sun Servers and the OpenSolaris Operating System, (login or registration required) address the need for a means to respond to the mounting pressure for highly scalable and flexible solutions for hosting applications and suggest open source as the answer.

The paper describes a reasonably-sized, scalable Web 2.0 deployment. In preparing the paper, the authors used Olio, a Web 2.0 toolkit created by Sun engineers as a realistic workload useful in testing the performance and scalability of Web 2.0 technologies.

The authors explain that Olio, an open source Apache software incubator project, provides three implementations of the same application using three different technology stacks: PHP, Rails, and the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE platform). The deployment described in this article uses the PHP implementation of Olio deployed on commonly used open source technologies that are popular with Web 2.0 sites.

The technologies themselves include Apache HTTP Server; PHP, APC, Memchached and MySQL database.

In the configuration tested, the authors did not use the load balancers or reverse proxy servers typical of Web 2.0 deployments. Further, the caching tier is combined with the Web server tier. The hardware configuration also consisted of load drivers, Web servers, database servers and an object store.

The software included OpenSolaris, Sun GlassFish Web Stack and an unstructured object store deployed on the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System by using the integrated Solaris ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool.

Results show that a throughput of 2008.573 operations/second was achieved for 10,000 concurrent users. The authors explain that overall system performance was gated by CPU and network performance in the Web tier and that considerable load exists on the object store as well - in terms of both network and disk I/O - since the application creates files as new users and events are added and retrieves stored objects for existing events and users.

Since the application uses memcached to cache data, the authors continue, the number of requests sent to the database is greatly reduced. This is important as it allows the Web tier to scale many times over before the database becomes a bottleneck.

In their conclusion, the authors write that by combining Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System running OpenSolaris and the GlassFish Web Stack, the solution is effective for Web 2.0 applications. Sun Fire X2270 and X4170 servers running OpenSolaris have sufficient capacity to combine the Web and caching tiers and handle a significant workload - 10,000 concurrent users running a PHP application using two pre-configured Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces.

More Information

OpenSolaris - home page

Sun Blade 6000 Modular System - Sun product page

Sun Fire X2270 Server - Sun product page

Sun Fire X4270

Sun GlassFish Web Stack [...read more...]

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