[plug] Web Server Specs

[Ben Jensz]

I agree, it depends how much traffic you are getting though and what
sort of content you are serving really.

For example, I have a server which serves out PHP + MySQL content, and
Perl in the form of web forums (which attract the majority of the
traffic on the web server) and I was running that on a Celeron 400 with
256Mb of SDRAM (as well as several other tasks).  That machine is now an
AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.2Ghz with 768Mb of SDRAM, and when it was running
Apache and the other services it runs, being FTP, Email services for a
couple of users (SMTP + POP3) and Bind master for the domain it serves
out, it barely registers anything on the MRTG graphing of the CPU usage
we have running for it.

The current web server usage for the main web site is approximately
220,000 page views a month (which is roughly 4.5Gb in data out of Apache
for that VirtualHost a month).  Under that current usage, I would be
guessing that Apache probably uses somewhere in the vicinity of possibly
384Mb of the available RAM for all of the VirtualHosts on it, maybe a
bit more.  The CPU gets a work out from other tasks I've put onto it
now, but Apache itself doesn't use much CPU at all.

Depends on the scale of your web serving needs, but unless you're
hosting a CPU intensive SQL database on it, Mhz won't make a huge
difference, RAM is important for sure though.


/ Ben

PS. I hope you have fun setting it up Adrian :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Grahame Bowland [mailto:grahame at ucs.uwa.edu.au] 
Sent: Monday, 11 February 2002 3:19 PM
To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] Web Server Specs

A vague guide:
 - buy RAM. The more RAM the better; you can handle more requests as you
have room for lots of apache processes, etc.
 - RAID-1 is a godsend. Software RAID under Linux is nice and simple.

-- 
Grahame Bowland                       Email: grahame at ucs.uwa.edu.au
University Communications Services    Phone: +61 8 9380 1175
The University of Western Australia     Fax: +61 8 9380 1109
                                     CRICOS: 00126G
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