Topic: Number of virtual hosts?

[blueevo]

How many is too many virtual hosts for one apache server?

Obviously we have hardware to bear in mind here, but as a rule of thumb, would 25 be a lot, or 100....??

Many thanks,

Blueevo.

[glsmith]

Too many variables to deal with, biggest two being available bandwidth and number of hits/day. At some point the number of hits to just one host could bury your bandwidth if it was a real busy site.

You could have 1 host that rarely get visited and one with couple 100k per day, lotsa graphics and bury bandwidth or 300 hosts that rarely get visited and never bury your bandwidth.

[blueevo]

Thanks, I appreciate the variable situation. Bandwidth asside, the true answer I am seeking is the processing consumption with having many virtual hosts.

Not from a bandwidth popint of view, just from a "Can apache handle x virtual hosts" sort of thing. Again, I know it is vague, it was just a curious questions.

We are talking an extremely low number of visitors on these sites. max of 50 hits per day each.

Thanks thanks,

Blueevo.

[glsmith]

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie-pop?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ0epRjfGLw

I head for bandwidth since that is usually first to go ....

It is an interesting question though, thought of giving it a try? Setup a thousand bogus hostnames in your hosts file all pointing to the server and make a thousand virtual hosts using all those names and see what happens between none, the max, and stuff in between.

I'd imagine that my 2.5GHz dual core is going to handle more than the 3.2GHz celeron D (the DC answers noticeably faster at least) sitting over there and it's going to handle more than the AMD Duron 1600 on Win2k sitting next to it.

Timing would be crucial as if all n number of sites are hit at once then it's certainly going to consume more than if they are not.

Modules loaded play a role as well. Compression costs, encryption costs, perl/php/your-fave-here costs.

Oh, and that DC w/ 2gb ram uses compression, has 42 unique vhosts with not a lot of hits. The majority of those are dynamic content not static. A couple run entirely under SSL provided visitors browser/os combo supports TLS SNI. It seems to handle them fine.