Revive Install on Amazon Web Services

[giantstep]

Has anyone had any success running RAS with Amazon EC2? What are the requirements for about 1m impressions a day? Would 2 instances or more be needed? 

I'm surprisingly finding very little information on this. All I am finding are links and post with large impressions (10m+ a day). How about for 1/10th of that?I imagined this would be a popular topic??

 

Edited February 27, 2016 by giantstep

[andrewatfornax]

Hi @giantstep,

The problem, as always, with trying to advise people about what size hardware they need is that systems are so amazingly configurable, and variable; and everyone has different expectations.

What webserver will you use? What version of PHP? What opcode cache (if any)? Will you local storage, or S3? Will it be solid state or not? Will you use disk based caching, or memcached? What database will you use - MySQL or PostgreSQL? How will that be tuned? 

Will you be tracking requests as well as impressions? Or just impressions? Will you be using the phpSniff option, and/or geotargeting lookups?

What kind of invocation tags will you be using - and what kind of banner load time is acceptable for your site? 1 second? 0.1 seconds? 10 seconds?

There really is so much that is variable, that it really is impossible for me or anyone else to answer the question - at least, in any meaningful way. I can obviously throw out an answer and say "You need this EC2 instance to host about 1m impressions a day", but I can guarantee you that you're only ever going to come back and tell me that it's too expensive for what you needed, or that it wasn't fast enough for what you needed. Never that it was a perfect fit.

The only sensible advice I can give you is - experiment! AWS at least makes it really easy to put your image onto S3, and then try out different sized instances. So, start with what your best guess is the right size, and if it's too slow, think about how you could tune performance, or scale it up. If it easily copes, and the performance monitoring shows that it's under utilised, scale it down.

I hope that helps.

[giantstep]

I hear what you're saying. I am trying to gather as much info as possible to not get into a situation where it is too expensive or not fast enough. I definitely expect it to be an experiment at first. This AWS experiment will be done alongside the current server so it can be switched back if needed. 

This is actually already hosted on a single VM with nginx, php5-fpm, memcache, and mysql from a colo. It is currently local storage. Someone else set this up. I am looking into moving this to AWS since they are shutting the colo down. 

The site has a fairly large demand and is serving a lot of ads (3 banners, 10 small ads that fit in a 400px x 600x space, and about 3 sidebar ads. I am monitoring the usage at the moment, which should help get in the ballpark of what is required, once I gather that data. 

 

 

 

[Ian]

If you host MySQL externally you'll get quite some latency on the uncached banners, this builds up on your TCP stack, slowing the rest down as well.

[giantstep]

I plan on running mysql internally.

It seems like I am just going to have to experiment with this. I have an idea of what it will take based on the current self-hosted server. I expect it will be around $600-$800 a month. Amazon scares me a bit with their billing, based on past experience with them. I am tempted to use Digital Ocean or Linode instead. 

[Ian]

600$ for 30 million imps/month is ways too expensive. You could save a lot of money outsourcing your ad-server hosting as well.

 

Edited March 8, 2016 by Ian van Marwijk

[adus]

We use RAS on AWS right now with the DB in RDS. No major issues although we are about 1/5 of the impressions per day but the load is minimal on that node.

Single server m3.medium runs php 8-14% cpu use. Hope that helps.

Edited March 9, 2016 by ZeroHour