Reference System
Thinking about the hardware equipment of your individual CMS machine
requires a reference point, a system with which the existing or planned
system can be compared. The differences of your own system to this reference
system may then serve as a guide for determining the required hardware.
Here, a medium-sized standalone system to which the following description applies serves as a reference system:
- Approximately 30 concurrent users (CU);
- Maintenance of websites with approximately 10.000 files, mainly web pages;
- Layouts (templates) with low or medium complexity.
- A computer system with a full installation of the CMS, i.e. all components of the CMS (Content Management Server, Template Engine, Search
Server, GUI, Portal Manager) are used;
- A professional database (not SQLite) is used;
- An authentication service (such as LDAP) and a webserver are also operated on this computer.
- The system is not used for other purposes that significantly increase
the basic load (e.g. as an SSL proxy or NFS server) or cause load peaks
(backup or software management server).
A machine for operating CMS Fiona and which meets these average demands, includes:
- Standard hardware with two processors
(such as an IBM x345 with 2x–Xeon, 2,8 – 3,0 GHz);
- At least 4 GB RAM;
- Fast I/O (e.g. SCSI RAID with RAID level 5).
For operating a live server based on Ruby on Rails, a dedicated live server is strongly recommended.
Database Selection
For large amounts of data, Oracle has proven to be reliable and fast if the appropriate hardware is used and the database has been configured properly. For Rails applications MySQL can also be recommended.
Recommendations
- RAM: More RAM increases performance most
efficiently, especially if the database is running on the same
computer. If the system has little RAM, more RAM can also
increase the overall performance because it reduces time-consuming
swapping, for example.
- Processor power: For computationally extensive
environments (frequent or extensive exports with complex layouts, SSL
encryption), faster or more processors are recommended.
- Harddisk I/O: Best file system performance (also
with frequent write access) plus very good reliability is offered by
RAID 10 (striping plus
mirroring).
- Network: If the Fiona components (especially the database) are operated on different machines, a fast network connection (Gigabit Ethernet might be required) with a short latency is essential. Bottlenecks in the network must be identified and removed.
Learn more about the different types
of system load the CMS generates and how this load can be reduced or
compensated by means of hardware extensions.