Should this webserver run 300-400 users fine?

[kau]

• Dual 2.4GHz Xeons

• 1500GB Bandwidth
• 1024MB RAM • 2 x 200GB Drives (RAID 1)

[Zachery]

It would be much better equiped to do so with SCSI drives :)

[kau]

Those aren't available for the price range I am looking for. Without SCSI will this do?

[Zachery]

Maybe, Wait for george, He can give you a much better guess than I can.

[AWS]

It should be more than enough horsepower even with no scsi. The Xeons won't have a problem compensating for the extra cpu power that ide drives require.

[Hooper]

AWS is correct. Modern EIDE is fine. SCSI, although I still use the Seagate Cheetah 10,000, are not necessary. Helpful if you are needing the throughput, but not necessary. It's more of an added luxury. Most of the sludge on the web is due to a garbage pipe at the server. Not the server itself.

[iblis]

With FreeBSD 5.3, and the soon to be completed ULE scheduler, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to get this performance.

May I also suggest that you get some small SCSI disks (17GB perhaps) and use them as system disks, and if you need storage space you could always supplement with some EIDE disks.

[Zachery]

If you end up using linux make sure to get the 2.6 kernel over the 2.4

[Hooper]

If you end up using any SCSI devices, and if it's your responsibility, make sure you have decent cooling for the drives. I've burned backplane traces. They get hot enough to totally melt a backplane.

[eva2000]

• Dual 2.4GHz Xeons

• 1500GB Bandwidth
• 1024MB RAM • 2 x 200GB Drives (RAID 1)
have you checked out theplanet.com's pricing on scsi based dual xeons ?

are those 200GB IDE PATA or SATA drives ? raid 1 with PATA/IDE would be pretty slow and a bottleneck, SATA would be slightly better but scsi would be best if you plan raid 1

if you building yourself, get 200GB Seagate 7200.7/8 based SATA NCQ supported drives - quiet and cool running

[kau]

I went with this. Do you guys think it will hold up to 300-400 users?

Server: Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz
Primary HDD: 120GB Hard Drive
Secondary HDD: 120GB Hard Drive
RAM: ECC Registered 2048 MB RAM
Uplink Port Speed: 100 Mbps Uplink

[Hooper]

It will handle it just fine.

[Robbban]

Do you plan to serve files (attachments)..?

We got 10mbit unmetered connection, P4 2,8GHz HT, 2048 MB ram, 3 x 40 GB harddrive and we are about to order our second for MySQL and thttpd's...

:)

Oh, we got about 200-300 users online :)

[eva2000]

I went with this. Do you guys think it will hold up to 300-400 users?

Server: Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz
Primary HDD: 120GB Hard Drive
Secondary HDD: 120GB Hard Drive
RAM: ECC Registered 2048 MB RAM
Uplink Port Speed: 100 Mbps Uplink
also mentioned this i think

As to your server requirements, there's a few things to note:

1. vB user online concurrently is based on default 15 min or 900 second cookie time out and is different from mysql concurrent connections

2. vB currently only can use mysql as a backend but later there will be ports to sybase and postgresql way after vB 3.x has been publicly released

3. MySQL regardless of forum software, provided it has the right hardware and mysql, php and apache configuration is good for theoretically 1000 - 1500 mysql concurrent connections (latter figure with the mysql rpm binaries) based on single dual cpu server setup (excluding dual, quad p4 xeons which could handle more)

4. this means you can have 1000 vB users online displayed but they actually can use 200 - 700 concurrent mysql max connections since vB shows those 1000 vB users over 15 mins / 900s and not the exact same second, you can have any combination

i.e.

300 members + 700 guests = 1000 vb users online past 15 min, with only 300 - 500 mysql concurrent connections in use

or

500 members + 500 guests = 1000 vb users online past 15min, with 500 - 800 mysql concurrent connections in use

both examples show 1,000 vb users online past 15mins but the latter example could place more load on the server due to more mysql concurrent connection usage

5. hardware isn't the only aspect which determines vB performance, you have to have apache, php and mysql configured optimally - left unoptimised especially mysql's configuration, then even the most powerful hardware will not perform well

6. if you set your vB timeout cookie higher than default 15 mins, you will show more vB users online - so set timeout cookie in vB admin panel to 30 mins, then the vB user online display will show users on in the past 30 mins thereby inflating the vB user online display - generally the higher the cookie timeout, the higher the vB users online to mysql concurrent connections ratio


so depends on what cookie timeout and make up of member/guest of those 200-300 users online reported by vB as to whether that server will handle it

300 members + 0 guests is ALOT more taxing on server than 20 members + 280 guests with same cookie timeout

same goes for 200-300 users over 900 s cookie time out more likely to be more taxing on server than 200-300 users over 14400 s cookie timeout