Server recommendations

[Erika Mesh]

Hi all,

I am working with the system administrator for my department to set up a Linux server to host AOI for my PhD research. My primary motivation for using our own server is (a) data confidentiality and (b) adding a small front end to collect some demographics for correlations.

Since I have the luxury of starting from scratch and configuring a virtual machine to suit my needs, I was curious if anyone had recommendations on server specs (# CPUs, RAM, Linux distro, disk space, etc.). Would you be able to share what the AOI.org hosting platform is? Has anyone else encountered CPU, RAM, etc bottlenecks that would indicate some "minimum" specs?

Thanks!

--Erika

Erika S. Mesh

PhD Student, Computing and Information Sciences, RIT

[Luke Baker]

Erika,

All Our Ideas currently runs on two Amazon EC2 instances. The
application server instance runs the AOI and pairwise-api Rails apps
as well as a instance of Redis. This server has 1.7GB RAM and 5
ECU[1][2]. The database instance runs MySQL and runs on a server with
7.5 GB RAM and 4 ECU[3].

The resources that you'll need will depend on how many simultaneous
users (i.e., users actively voting on the site at the same time) you
expect as well as the amount of data you expect to collect. I estimate
the All Our Ideas server could handle somewhere in the range of 20 -
40 concurrent users with its current setup. The limiting factor for
the AOI application instance is likely RAM. I expect it'd sooner use
up all the RAM before maxing out the CPU.

Most people could get away with running only a single server and
running the Rails applications and the database on that server. All
Our Ideas has over 4 years of data and 5 million votes, which is why
the database needs to be a bit beefier than most people would likely
need. A good starting point might be something comparable to the AOI
application server, perhaps with an additional 500MB - 1GB of RAM to
accommodate running the database on it.

Luke

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it
[2] c1.medium on this page: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
[3] m1.large on this page: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

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[Erika Mesh]

Thanks Luke! 

The single server setup sounds like it should be sufficient for my purposes for the foreseeable future. I am researching the Software Engineering practices and priorities of academic research scientists that develop their own software (not unlike the foundations of AOI). It's a pretty small target audience and while I hope the project lives on for some time, I doubt I'll ever have to worry about "millions" of votes. Just achieving "thousands" would be wonderful. ;)

Erika S. Mesh

PhD Student, Computing and Information Sciences, RIT

erika....@gmail.com | esmesh.wordpress.com