Re: PGXN Hosting

On May 11, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Dave Page wrote:

> Yes. Assuming you can use Debian. You'll get monitoring and updates
> for free though, as our hosting platform manages that for us.

I'm using Ubuntu now, so that's fine, as long as I can compile stuff from source (Perl 5.12 for example).

> What sort of size machine were you looking for?

Right now the usage of PGXN is quite light. And the main site itself relies almost entirely on static JSON files to generate content (only the search engine is dynamic). So its needs are pretty modest.

There are four parts:

1. PGXN Manager. This is a full PostgreSQL-9.0-backed web app, with authentication and all dynamic requests. This is the app one uses to register for the network and to upload distributions. Its usage is therefore pretty light.

2. The master mirror server. PGXN Manager manages it, and otherwise all it needs are an rsyncd instance for it and a Web server to serve its files. I've been using Apache.

3. PGXN API. This is a glorified mirror. It syncs from the master mirror every hour and processes things, creating HTML documentation pages and updating the full-text index (which is not tsearch, BTW).

4. PGXN Site. Reads directly from the PGXN API document root to serve the site.

So there are quite a few things it does, but almost all the Web serving is static or lightly processed files. There's on PostgreSQL 9.0 database and otherwise a mix of Apache, Plack, and rsync processes and cron jobs. The current box is real (not virtual), but modest: 2 cores, RAID 0, 2GB RAM. The current database is only 8MB in size, so memory requirements are not huge. I'd be surprised if it hit 100MB in the next six months.

Long term, I think it will make sense to split these tasks up into two boxes, but for now, just one modest box ought to do the trick.

Thanks,

David