Once you get around 500+ GBs of traffic to a server with multiple projects on you either have a) only static files b) hopefully have a good setup for database indexes, object caching CMS and such…

I deploy a separate 10k SCSI cache-disk – outside the RAIDs for those object caching tasks and believe me or not – even these disks are too slow… (next step would be a RAID0 stripe) and I just kicked out the last SATA based Dual XEON server… (having the 2nd HD failure on that SATA crap)

Today I realized that the standard RedHat Enterprise 3 deployment is a bit setup like a desktop system.

• A nice and quick improvement: disable "access time" (or do you care when your files were last "read" ... ?)
• another thing to try… a new EXT3 mode – as they have 3 different – and one IBM guy noticed some really odd improvements by even increasing security
• get rid of disk quotas if they were setup initially (ok – they might help you in a shared hosting environment – but you should be able to take care of your own projects without that overhead)

Some nice links to read up…

• read this => EXT3 fstab modes for performance ... this just rocks:

• Using EXT3 in 2.4 kernels
• Discussion on best filesystem incl. EXT3
• Kernel 2.4 release info with some nice addon info for EXT3 FS
• my favorite Server oritented system tuning (altough a bit outdated)
• File system performance comparison WP for Solaris OS, UFS, Linux ext3, and ReiserFS
• "Tuning (SUSE) LINUX Enterprise Server":http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3862.pdf – a very good IBM redbook explaining tuning steps that also apply to other linux derivates mostly

• RedHat EXT3 tuning suggestions

and a quick-step how to apply the tricks above (no warranties as usual)