Step 2: Moving the Database

Scaling WebObjects
Example Apps
Step 0
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
Step 7
Step 8
Summary
Postscript

Lets buy 2 more G3 boxes. One box is going to be the "image server" box, after all, one third of the bandwidth is spent just serving the images for nile.com, and 15% of the yippee.com users. So we can offload the web server by one third to 15% just by moving that data to a new box.

The other box is going to be just for the database.

So both of these are $2K, plus we buy $1K worth of RAM for each, so we've just spent an additional 6K. Now lets talk database costs! FrontBase Platinum is $2500, and Oracle 8 is going to be $15000. I'm also going to assume another week of engineering time to make sure everything moves over ok, so that's an additional $6K.

So the cost increment to go from step #1 to step #2 is $14,500-$27,000 depending on whether you went with Oracle or FrontBase. We still haven't needed to upgrade our WO license yet because we'll probably get 400 tpm out of our current database setup. So the next step is to start upgrading our database machine.

Next page: Step 3, More Database Power

Nile.com bottom line:

Initial Engineering $72,000

HW investment: $17,700

Network: $1000/month.

Max ppm: 40 (limited by database, estimate of 400 tpm)

Max profit: $38,400/month.

Yipee.com bottom line:

Initial Engineering $24,000

HW investment: $17,700

Network: $1000/month.

Max ppm: 16 (limited by database, estimate of 400 tpm)

Pages/day: 7680

Max users: 307

Cost per user/month: $16.84