Server's crashed again... | FerrariChat
Buy

Server's crashed again...

Discussion in 'California & Nevada (Northern)' started by tvrfreak, Sep 20, 2004.

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, Skimlinks, and others.

  1. tvrfreak

    tvrfreak F1 Rookie
    BANNED

    Mar 31, 2003
    3,879
    Arkansas
    Full Name:
    F K
    #1 tvrfreak, Sep 20, 2004
    My employer got an awesome quad-pentium server a couple of months ago, with gajillions of disk space (all super-fast disks with tons of redundancy) and four (!) redundant gigabit ethernet ports. It has 32 gigs of RAM, and the machine is screaming FAST.

    Noone is using the machine at the moment, since we bought it to test our software, and the next version hasn't been developed to the point that it needs to be tested.

    In the meantime, I had a programmer buddy write a script to scan the web and download any video file with Top Gear or Jeremy Clarkson or Tiff Needell or related keywords in it--and categorize it in a comprehensive database. Those it couldn't figure out, I entered in the database manually. We then have a non-publicized web page that is generated automatically and lists all the videos and tells each user if there's any they haven't seen. It does a lot of other fancy things as well, but the basic idea is to be able to keep up with all the Top Gear videos out there.

    All was running smoothly until too many people in the company started streaming the videos--now the server keeps crashing.

    The script my buddy wrote renamed all files and directories so they look like system files, so the error logs don't say anything incriminating. But my boss is a bit concerned about the reliability of the machine and wants to send it back...I have to figure out how to stop this damn thing from crashing or we are going to lose our video library. It looks like too many paging file requests, but I wonder if this is a symptom, not a cause.

    I have put in budget requests for a couple more servers so we can do some load balancing, or at least get the data off if this one is sent back.

    Anyone have experience with streaming videos (multiple, simultaneous streams) or any other ideas?
     
  2. Artherd

    Artherd F1 Veteran

    Jun 19, 2002
    6,588
    Bay Area, CA
    Full Name:
    Ben Cannon
    #2 Artherd, Sep 21, 2004
    Faisal- what OS?

    I've built video-streaming systems that boggle the mind, in the 10s of thousands of compressed streams. This on a single HA pair of SGI Origin 200s with 2 225mhz processors and 2GB RAM. I've also served multiple UNcompressed streams off bigger SGI hardware (I've got an Onyx2 with 16 processors and as much RAM. Load it up with FibreChannel and Gigabit Ethernet modules untill I turn blue. I've seen a similar system performing more than 2gigaBYTES per second over TCP/IP network via NFS3. That's 16gigabits/sec...) Even Intel hardware these days is capable of delivering content fairly well, though not as well as the example above.


    I can't imagine there are enough machines (let alone people, let alone intrested people) at your company to cause this hardware any kind of trouble on an imperical level.

    Over 4GB of RAM is still a BIG BIG BIG problem on Intel hardware however. And the bigger boxes tend to have all kinds of ugly PCI and other bridges and links to handle 4 or more processors. Infact, if you have the so-called "Hyper-Threading" turned on, your OS will see 8 processors. This can cause problems in both Windows and Linux, as can the RAM issue.

    It could also be a simple noise issue, I was doing a project for MIT Lincoln Labs recently, we had a video capture board suite in a 4-way Xeon Dell PowerEdge 2600. In this platform, we got horrible video noise and corruption. We could not duplicate the problem on the stock 1U Xeon servers, or any other platform.
     
  3. Artherd

    Artherd F1 Veteran

    Jun 19, 2002
    6,588
    Bay Area, CA
    Full Name:
    Ben Cannon
    #3 Artherd, Sep 21, 2004
    PS: you need a local mirror of that server's essential business content... I have the perfect off-site geographically diverse location as well! ;)
     

Share This Page