i'm looking into dedicated servers, reliablity and cost are main issues.
after reading some posts, servermatrix looks good
their cheapest plan:

Intel Celeron – 1.7Ghz
512 Ram
80GB ATA 100 7200 RPM HDD
1000 GB Bandwidth
99.9% SLA Guarantee
RedHat Linux

i'm wondering if it can handle a forum with ~2000 members, around 100 active at peak times with around 1600 posts a day pumping out ~80gigabytes of bandwidth a month. this is an invision board. i'm also looking to host a small shoutcast radio on it, max users 50, i will lower the users and/ reduce bitrate if bandwidth is a problem.

however i'm wondering if the server mentioned above can handle all of this. can it handle it easily? or barely?

oh the radio is not on 24/7
basically i'm saying won't worry about the bandwidth, just the cpu/mem specs

The shoutcast would probably should not be a problem but the forum depending on what you use, may or may not handle it. Try getting a P4. It should probably do better.

Originally posted by eddy2099
The shoutcast would probably should not be a problem but the forum depending on what you use, may or may not handle it. Try getting a P4. It should probably do better.
we are on a very very very small budget :)

we are using invision 1.3 final without any mods

I guess you could try.. If it is very busy, it will just be slow but will still do the job.

We've got customers running in a similar spec VPS's running with 5-600 users with no serious problems. Of course there might be other bottlenecks we don't hit

Rus

Two things are a must here: mysql caching and php scripts caching, with those 100 online users can be handled by this spec without noticeable slowdowns.

is php caching handled by apache?
and what about mysql caching

servermatrix looks good if you're in the US and can reach them on the phone. Their email / ticket responses are ... how do i put it .. sllooowwww! I'm still waiting for a respose for something I sent them over a week back.

mysql caching can be enabled by tweaking mysql config file.
for php scripts caching you need to install one of the available caching modules: php accelerator, turckmmcache, zend accelerator.

out of the php modules, which one would you recommend to be the best?

I'd go with turckmmcache, their site:
http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net

I totally agree with phpdeveloper Iam using it on my sites and boy what a difference :)

we have a celeron 1.7ghz machine that runs a forum of similar proportions, but using phpbb - the loads we experience with 100 active users are at worst up to 0.20 - most of the time it runs at 0.01-0.05.

it takes more of a hit on our box processing webstats!

like the guys have said, mmcache for php and turn on query and thread caching in mysql...

Go with TurckMMcache
optimize mysql

also a upgrade to a gig of ram would help out alot.

Originally posted by phpdeveloper
I'd go with turckmmcache, their site:
http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net

I read somewhere that you can only run one or the other, so should I uninstall zend optimizer in favor of turck?

I think Zend is way better than turck.

Have you ever seen the benchmarks for Turck VS Zend?