HW/SW for license server

[Valery Reznic]

Hi, All.

I need to setup license server and looking for advice what hardware/software to use


General schema is following:

There are about 20K clients all of them periodically (let say once a week) query license server for license via https

I'll try my best to spread all those requests over the week, but in worse case scenario all those 20K request can came during 1hour,
spread relative evenly i.e about 6 request/sec

When license server get request it query database ~20K records with 2-3 small fields, generate license and return it to client.

License generation is light - md5sum of the very small input ( few hundreds bytes)

I think use following software for it


1. CentOS 6

2. Apache with mod_python
3. Mysql

My questions about software are:
1. License server software is likely to be written in python, hence mod_python.
  If I'll use python as CGI instead of Apache module, will it result in significant performance drop?

2. How configure apache - what is reasonable settings for MaxClient parameter?
   Any other important settings?


3. Use Mysql or Postgres? Or something else?

Hardware questions are:
1. What computer should I use for this task
    i386 or x86-64?
   how much memory?
   disk spaces?

2. What hosting company to buy this server from?

Do you have any experience or suggestions to share?

Thank you,
Valery.
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