Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

server specs

I want to build a nice server. What am I looking at for specs (MHz, RAM, hard disk, etc.) to be able to handle a medium traffic site?

__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

IF you are just loading static non database pages, a good 200 mhz, 64 mb memory, and a nice 10 gig 7200 ide raid drive would be cool. you really odn't need much, and no offence, It will be hard to get medium traffic I think. You can upgrade shall thetime come.

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-miradu

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Chandler, AZ
Posts: 289

It really depends on what your expecting the server to accomplish.. I have my system @ home setup as a development server which run Windows 2000, IIS5, ASP, PHP, Apache, MySQL, etc..etc.. on a Celeron 333 .. granted, its not ideal for a production server, but its pretty amazing how fast it responds considering all of the non-server specific services I run on it (I use it as my workstation as well)

If your planning on hosting mostly static pages on the server, I think what miradu recommended could work out just fine to start with (infact, I setup a web server similar (P2/266 w/256MB RAM, WinNT4)for a company for their customers .. a moderate level of traffic, mostly static, but works great and even on that system, virtually never goes about 10% CPU usage..

If you are wanting to do a dyanmic site (database backend, transactions, ssl, file sharing, streaming video/audio, etc..) then more power is better .. However, again, even for a site like this, if you are running a dedicated server for your medium traffic site, even what would be considered a low-end server (600mhz-1ghz processor, 256mb ram, 2x10GB HD, etc) would still probably be more than adaquate even when you have bursts of traffic .. (and I am guessing the limiting factor would be bandwidth limitations, not server processing power)

IF you can provide more information regarding the type of site you will be hosting on the server, where the server will be located (data center, business, home) and what type of bandwidth the server will have (modem, dsl, cable, t1, t3, oc-12 and up..) and any projected levels of traffic on the site (are you talking 5,000 hits per day? 50,000 hits per day? 500,000 hits per day?) then I (or someone else) could give you a better idea of what to look for in a server and what you may want to consider having on the server (for uptime requirements, optimizing for page load times, etc..)

Joe

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

quote:

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Originally posted by Cerulean If you are wanting to do a dyanmic site (database backend, transactions, ssl, file sharing, streaming video/audio, etc..) then more power is better ...

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__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Chandler, AZ
Posts: 289

If your looking at 5,000-10,000 .. i think pretty much any server setup will do (Unless all of those hits are going to be grabbing huge realvideo files from a G2 server setup or doing some serious server-side processing ..) --

Just an interesting tid-bit ---> right before I got on Visorcentral, I was toying with PHP and MySQL .. A friend of mine was wanting to do some text searches from the bible (stuff like how many times does a certain word or phrase show up in the bible, etc..) -- so I found the bible as HTML files ... about 1200 total .. in anycase, I opened up Notepad and programmed up a little parser in PHP that would strip the HTML code and leave me with just the bible text (bible edition, book, testament, verse numbers, etc..) .. and then I inserted the information into MySQL .. Just to see if it worked I decided to database Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Psalms and Genesis.. Within about a minute, all of those verses were stored in MySQL (7377 records) ---> according to lots of people on the net, inserts into MySQL are SLOW .. basically I was able to open up an html file, strip out the HTML markup, pull out a verse, and insert it into a database --> 123 times per second .. (seems pretty fast to me)

Multiplying that out, using the slow insert function of MySQL on my Celery-333, I could feesibly do 10.6 million record inserts per day -- remember, this is along with having to open up html files, get the data out of them and then inserting (so there is some overhead, not pure insert functions..)

I then decided to do some searches for various things (ie "He Wept", "Jesus", etc..) against those 7377 records (which equal about 450,000 words) --> without indexing the records in anyway on that particular field, I was able to complete my Query requests within 2 to 4 hundreths of a second ... So thats equivalent to doing a random phrase search on about 1,000 of these replies in less time than it takes to blink your eye .. (I guess those inserts ARE slow in comparison..)

I am not sure how much all of this makes sense to you, but basically what I am getting at is unless your friend is doing some seriously CPU intensive tasks (ie server side processing of graphic files, hosting an extremely huge database (hundreds of thousands or millions of records) and running full text searches against it all day, streaming multiple video streams 24/7, etc..etc..) I think pretty much any box used should do the trick -- just a matter of finding out how much he ultimately wants to spend.

As far as an operating system, Linux: Yah .. it works .. There are sites that have grown to over 26 servers (something like 4.5 terrabytes of data, 44ghz of processing power, servering up millions of pages a day, etc..) using the Linux/MySQL/PHP/Apache combo (sourceforge.net) -- From the sounds of it, I think it should work out just fine for your friend.

Joe

ps -- if i run across a good, free web design program, I'll let you know ..

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

Thanks Joe!

__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.