What Server?

[NeedScripts]

I am thinking of getting another server and would like to know your opinion?

Server One
Intel Pentium 4™ 2Ghz
512MB PC133/DDR SDRAM
36GB SCSI Hard Drive
5 IP Addresses
Red Hat™ Linux 7.3

Server Two
AMD Athlon XP™ 2200 1.8Ghz
512MB PC133/DDR SDRAM
36GB SCSI Hard Drive
300GB Bandwidth
5 IP Addresses
Red Hat™ Linux 7.3

I don't know *much* about servers, but from what I see above, I think the only difference is processor..

So what do you guys think? which one would be more stable? safe? better?

Thanks for the help :)

[seindal]

From the information you give here there shouldn't be much difference. The CPU is not a very important factor in selecting a server. In order of importance I'd say the priorities would be

* Capacity of network connection

Can the line it sustain peek throughput? Otherwise you have a bottleneck and customers get timeouts.

* Amount of RAM

Web-servers need space, especially under peek load. You might need many threads/processes and they need memory. With too little memory your server will be unable to service your customers under peek load.

* Speed of harddisks

The data ultimately resides on the harddisk, and the speed with which it can be accessed can be a factor, if you have too little memory to cache the most important parts of it. The speed of the disks is composed of capacity of the system bus, the controller data transmission speed and the harddisk speed.

CPU speed is way down the list. Most web-applications are i/o intensive, not cpu intensive. A faster cpu or a multi-cpu setup might speed up things, but *only* if the line is fast enough, there is enough memory to hold the server processes and all cached data and the disk-subsystem is capable of supplying data fast enough. For normal server applications there will normally be other bottlenecks before the CPU capacity. On most servers the cpu sits idle for 90+% of the time, waiting for some other event.

René Seindal.