Mininova’s Server Setup

Written by Ernesto on September 27, 2006 

What keeps the most popular BitTorrent site on the Internet in the air? In case you ever wondered, here’s the answer.

Mininova is powered by 7 servers in total. They use Dual Opteron V20z and V40z servers with 2G or 4G DDR and a RAID-1 setup, connected to a 80Mbit/s connection (exept the forum server).

  • Server 1 and 2 handle the http requests
  • Server 3 and 4 take care of the search queries
  • Server 5 is the sql server
  • Server 6 hosts the forum (at another datacenter)
  • Server 7 is for backups, the blog, serving ads and some development stuff.

    • Click to enlarge the picture.

    mininova servers

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    12 Responses

    1 Sep 27, 2006 at 19:42 by pegwole

    Hmm, maybe I could setup somehting like that in my house for no damn reason at all.

    2 Sep 27, 2006 at 19:53 by deejam

    Why use one server for each service? If the database server go down then all services will probably go down etc. And some servers are probably more used than others.

    I preffer ha-clusters that are less sensitive for hardware failure and uses the hardware more efficent.

    3 Sep 27, 2006 at 20:00 by choopie

    So the internet IS a series of tubes!

    4 Sep 27, 2006 at 21:21 by imaguy

    how the hell do they get the budget for all this ?

    5 Sep 27, 2006 at 21:30 by Bilal

    Well as far as i know the budget is covered quite easily with the adverts they display on the page. Think about how many users they get and the income they must get from all the adverts. They have 1 advert at the top, one on the right side and a usenext client text on every torrent page.

    6 Sep 27, 2006 at 23:19 by will

    anyone know which program they used to draw the network diagram?

    :)

    7 Sep 27, 2006 at 23:23 by Tyler

    They used Microsoft Visio for the drawing

    8 Sep 28, 2006 at 00:56 by Memememememememe

    ^^ I think he was being sarcastic….

    Im surprised the SQL server is only on a RAID 1 though, I would have presumed it was a much more powerful storage system

    9 Sep 28, 2006 at 11:48 by mike

    Wouldn’t a RAID5 setup for the SQL server be much more efficient???

    10 Sep 28, 2006 at 12:25 by anonymous

    Re:mike

    RAID-5 will be a nightmare where happens many writes to database.
    Mininova is actually a “read most, write rare” situtation but anyway, RAID-1 will give much more speed advantage over RAID-5

    RAID-5 is quite a poor-man’s-redundacy solution. Don’t expect any performance gains on a RAID-5 setup.

    RAID 10 (1+0) on large databases is generally the elegant solution.

    11 Sep 29, 2006 at 07:35 by JDog

    No, RAID5 (or any other RAID for that matter) will not provide more efficiency (read: speed) than RAID-1 (striping). It is used in situations where speed is of utmost importance.

    12 Oct 17, 2006 at 18:59 by MJ

    Raid – 0 is striping, Raid – 1 is mirroring (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID). For read intensive stuff Raid – 1 will be as fast as Raid – 0 but the redundancy in case of disk failure

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