Can An 8-Node Raspberry Pi Cluster Web Server Survive Hackaday?

I don't get it...

What's the surprise in having a cluster of 8 Pi serve 45k hits a month? That's 25 hits per hour, a single Pi would do it. Plus, Apache..?

The actual cluster is hosting the site at: http://raspberrywebserver.com/

"takes up much less space."

In the 90s I experimented with clusters using stacks of desktops and occasionally blew circuit breakers, and in the 00s I had a much smaller (but still pretty big) stack of 1U rackmount servers in the basement. I like the idea of a stack of 8 servers to experiment with fitting in a small desk drawer or shoebox. Also the sonic impact of my experimental toy clusters has decreased dramatically as size has shrunk.

The most useful thing I ever did with my toy home clusters was when .mp3 started getting big but a typical desktop took 20 minutes to encode just one song, I ripped my whole CD collection quickly using my cluster. It would have been just as fast to split by CD with 10 CDs on 10 machines, but it was a much more cluster-y learning experience to rip a single CD in parallel. From memory it took a typical drive about as long to read a cdrom to wav files as it took any other machine to convert one song from wav to mp3 so I set up a pipeline with unfortunately pretty high latency. The point of this industrial archeology anecdote is it would be interesting to find a "real world" app like this for a rasp-pi cluster. I suppose the tried and true povray raytracing or mandelbrot rendering is still cool, it would be interesting to learn of new toy cluster apps.

A couple times over the past decades I've applied my home toy cluster experience to real work jobs. Its all the same software after all, although the "real" stuff at work ran an order or two magnitude faster than what I had at home.

This is a pretty neat hack and I can certainly see the fun in setting up something like this.

However, I am amused that the load balancer is a fairly powerful PC[1] that could probably serve the web site just as effectively as the whole cluster of 8 RPis and then some. On the other hand, the PC probably uses a lot more power...

1: http://raspberrywebserver.com/raspberrypicluster/raspberry-p...

If it's static content and not chock full of JavaScript and other stuff it should be fine.

I managed to shift serious amounts of pages out of a 75MHz SPARC 20 back in the day.

The Pi's biggest strength is it's GPU. Using some of the OpenMAX API's for video or 3D encoding would probably be a better use than a CPU-bound task like web serving:

http://elinux.org/Raspberry_Pi_VideoCore_APIs

I'm interested in the performance characteristics of weak-node clusters versus strong-node clusters. I wonder what he'll say when HN hits his site?

Nice i'll attempt something similar in a month to play/learn with clusters on linux. Btw is the server handling php or any other language. Are you hosting this like in your house? how much bandwith do you have?

Better yet, can it survive an HN load that seems to take down typical blogs? I'm genuinely curious to see what happens throughout the day.

So far so good. The pages load quickly.