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cycloop
Sun 9th Jan '05, 1:04pm
Hi all,

Currently we are running a forum based on phpBB. We have an average of 60 concurrent users (within a period of 15 minutes), who read a lot. The number of posts ranges from 50 - 200 a day. We are running on a shared host and we're getting complaints that we are using too much server resources.

Here are some statistics of the site:

. Avg Max
Hits per Hour 2058 5931
Hits per Day 49398 76186
Files per Day 37093 59000

I am planning to buy a dedicated server, and to move the forum to vBulletin. I need the server to support some growth, let's say up to an average of 100 concurrent users with a peak capacity of 150 users. The server will only run this website with the forum, no other significant processes.

We are considering the following hardware as a dedicated server:
- Single processor AMD Athlon XP 3000+, with 1 Gb memory, 2x 40 Gb RAID 1

We will be able to configure the server ourselves, and we do have enough technical knowledge to compile and configure apache/php/mysql, put databases in memory, etc.

My questions are:
- Will this server be able to run vBulletin with a maximum of 150 users?
- Anyone willing to make an educated guesstimate on how much concurrent users this server should be able to handle?
- Can anyone share their experiences with similar servers? How much users are you able to run?

Thanks for your time,

Menno

eva2000
Wed 12th Jan '05, 8:55pm
AthlonXP are not great for server duties in general. For starting out the cheap/value for money option would be something like

Pentium 4 2.8C 800fsb cpu
1GB PC3200 DDRAM - with the 2.8C cpu only option would be ECC Unbuffered ram which generally costs more than ECC Registered ram
2x 80GB SATA raid 1 for OS
2x 80GB SATA raid 1 for mysql data partition
dual gigabit 10/100/1000 speed network cards

Apache 2.0.x latest stable release compiled via prefork mpm worker
PHP 4.3.10 + Turck Mmcache and Zend Optimizer 2.5.7 (optional) and above
MySQL 4.0.23
Latest stable 2.6.x smp linux kernel

I suggested the 2.8C 800fsb cpu as it supports hyperthreading so an extra virtual cpu so with smp compiled linux kernel you'll see 2 cpus in top stats and more better for web serving duties.

100-150 vb users with 50/50 member/guest ratio should hold up to begin with