RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform -- MIDRANGE-L

1,000,000 in an hour is less 300 per second, so that's perhaps a reasonable
number.  Your page is over 12KB without graphics, so that's still
30MBit/sec, but dual T3s will handle that load.  But there's a big
difference between 30 per second, 300 per second and 3000 per second.
There's also a big difference between new (non-cached) visitors and repeat
visitors.

When we talk about how much load the iSeries can handle, these numbers are
crucial.  Being off by a factor of 10 when discussing the fate of the box is
not the best way to keep the box around.  Web application serving is a more
complex issue than it seems at first blush, but in the end the real limiting
factor is likely to be your Internet bandwidth.  Given a dedicated T3 line
and a typical 10-15KB page, there is an upper limit of 450 new visitors per
second.  Period.

The majority of companies don't run on a T3, I think (at >US$10K/month, it's
pretty expensive).  Running on a T1 connection, you are going to be limited
to no more than 15 new page requests per second.  That's it.

So trying to figure out whether a given computer can handle 1000 requests
per second is sort of like figuring out whether it can handle 10,000
simultaneous users.  Interesting to know, but hardly relevant to the
majority of customers.

Joe



> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
> [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Andrew Borts
> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 10:48 AM
> To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform
>
>
> OK in my defense.  I didn't drop the thing - the company did.  I
> could argue
> many of these things to the people signing my paychecks, but part of the
> AS/400 is a perception one, one never defended by IBM, only by us.
> 3200 per second is a calculation from one of my E-mails of what is being
> sent out.  The site needs to respond to 3200 people per second
> successfully.
> One of our partners is sending 1 million e-mails out with the
> word free (our
> web site - www.myfreeitems.com ) they serve millions of visitors per day -
> they have the consummate NT farm, and there stuff doesn't sweat.
> These are
> the people that do GroupLotto.com - they partnered with us to do
> grouplottofreeitems.com - my experience with each of these
> E-mails with the
> word free is 25% of them go to the site within an hour of receiving the
> E-mail.  If 25% to 50% come to the site (1,000,000) within an hour then
> we're looking @ some serious traffic.  The AS/400's are hooked into a
> facility with Dual T3's heading @ them, so they have bandwidth @ their
> disposal.  Akami technologies caches all of our graphics - so the
> only thing
> the system is doing is html.