Server - What is sufficient

Could this handle 500GB transfer / month

[Visit Thailand]

Do you think the server config below could easily and without slowing down the sites too much handle 500GB a month?

Single Pentium 4 1.8 GHz
Unix/Apache OS
512 KB cache
256 MB DDR2100 RAM
40 GB ULTRA ATA/133
100 MBps Bay Networks Ethernet Card
Integrated S3 Pro Savage8 32MB DDR AGP 4X
Multi-Homed OC-12 Fiber Connections
EXT3 File System Architecture

FYI - there would be around 4 sites on the machine but do you think it could handle 500 GB transfer a month for the whole machine?

If you could add anything to above config what would you add?

[DaveN]

I think it would handle it but i would look at a Raid sytem or at least a secondary HDD.

DaveN

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't think bandwidth is the issue. It depends on if that is serving 5k static pages or 50k dynamic pages. What kind of page views are you expecting?

That's pretty low amount of ram. The general sweet spot for that size of system is somewhere between a half gig and a gig.

[Visit Thailand]

Thanks for your reply DaveN.

Which of the Raid systems would you recommend - have a choice of Raid 1 and Raid 5?

Plus the host says that this config could handle an estimated 15,000 web pages. This does not seem an awful lot.

Do you think If I added a second HDD that would handle more?

ADD IN :

Brett - Thanks I am unsure of pageviews as yet as this is the move over to dedicated which will combing around 4 sites and then we will be adding another 6.

One of our sites is heavy demand with static 50kb pages and thoudsands of pages others are much simpler and less demanding.

I could add memory for example an additional 1 Gig would be US$ 125 / month.

[edited by: Visit_Thailand at 11:35 am (utc) on Nov. 27, 2002]

[Brett_Tabke]

15,000!?

WebmasterWorld is boxed in 400meg here with 100+k pages.

[creative craig]

I would have at least half gig for ram.

Craig

[DaveN]

RAID 5, both parity and data are striped across a set of disks.

The disks are able to satisfy requests independently which provides high read performance

Also RAID 5 can withstand a single disk failure without losing data or access to data.

DaveN

[Visit Thailand]

Thank you all for your help.

Do you think :

1 - The Raid 5 - do you think its usefullness justifies US$ 175 per month? Is is that useful?

2 - That similar system to above (Single P4 1.8 Gig) but with a Single P4 2.5 Gig instead would make a noticeable difference to speed of websites etc?

3 - Why do you think a host would put that such a system which is a dedicated server would host an estimated 15,000 pages only? -- that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

[dbowers]

>>1 - The Raid 5 - do you think its usefullness justifies US$ 175 per month?
You'll get many opinions, but I think (a) the cost/benefit difference between RAID5 and RAID1 favors RAID1; and (b) $175/month for RAID5 on 40GB IDE is too much. (You can flat out purchase an IDE RAID5 card for $200).

>>2 - That similar system to above (Single P4 1.8 Gig) but with a Single P4 2.5 Gig instead would make a noticeable difference to speed of websites etc?
Only if you're serving dynamic web pages that use lots of database access and the database software is running on the same machine. :)

>>3 - Why do you think a host would put that such a system which is a dedicated server would host an estimated 15,000 pages only? -- that makes no sense to me whatsoever.
So you'll buy 2 instead of 1.