** Using WeBWorK **

So I am of course very interested in hearing what type of hardware others are using. For example, what sort of CPU, operating system, amount of memory, hard drive size and configuration, etc.

Also, how many students do you typically have using WW in a term would also be beneficial to know.

Thanks in advance. Brian

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We have had very good luck with Dell PowerEdge Dual Xeon Servers. At Rochester we use FreeBSD but most WeBWorK installations I know of run some flavor of Linux. At a minimum I would get 2 GB of memory and say 3 Ghz processors (e.g. a low to middle range PowerEdge 1800).

By comparison hosted.webwork.edu (which must be 6-8 years old at this point) has as CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (498.47-MHz 686-class CPU) FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs and 512 MB of memory.

Our current server for about 1200 Rochester students (maybe 3 years old)has as CPU: Intel(R) XEON(TM) CPU 2.00GHz (1987.56-MHz 686-class CPU) Hyperthreading: 2 logical CPUs FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs and 1 GB of memory.

Michigan recently substancially increased their use of WeBWorK and switched from Solaris to Linux. Maybe P Gavin LaRose <glarose@umich.edu> will comment on this or you could email him.

Arnie

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We have about 4500 students a semester doing testing and/or homework on our server. We just moved from a pair of Solaris boxes to a Linux (RedHat Enterprise 3) four dual-core Xeon 2.8GHz system (8 effective CPUs) with 12GB of memory. Thus far I don't think the load we've put on it has strained it at all. I think we've seen system loads get in the 1.3 range, but never above that.

Gavin

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http://webwork2.math.nau.edu/active/Load.png http://webwork2.math.nau.edu/active/ActiveCount.png

The machine has two 2.7 GHZ processors with 4 GB RAM running Redhat enterprise. Some of the large peaks in the load are cron jobs running at night.

Nandor

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