Let's consider the offer of RAQ3 from 4webspace.com
This solution has only 32 megs of RAM, and thus I'm wondering whether this would be enough to handle this load:
more or less 1.100 unique IPs a day, 30.000 page views, ALL dynamic: they are in PHP and made using 4 or 5 queries for each page to the DBMS. Result sets from MySQL are quite small.
So, 32 megs in your opinion would be enough? If not, how much megs of RAM do I need?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards, :)

Go to www.crucial.com and order some ram for the it. Its pretty damn cheap. The more ram the better =) Overkill is better than serverkill

I have no experience with a server with only 32 MB RAM, but I guess the performance will be a disaster. I wouldn't use this even with static sites. If $ is the major concern I would start with 256 MB RAM...

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?model=RaQ+3&x=4&y=10

256MB $30.99 $27.89

60 bucks for 512MB of ram


Its a nobrainer.

everybody always seems to say that getting more RAM will make a server becomes much better! Well, it does ... but more RAM may not help it .... I learn this by having a direct experience with my server ... Currently I have P3/850 (dual capable) with 2GB of memory and 30GB 7200rpm HD ... I though .. well, with 2GB memory, the servre is powerfull enough to handle anything ...
Not true ... I host two very busy VB forums with around 600 thousands hits per day and around 100 thousands page views ... pumping around 4-5GB of transfer per day (thanks to mod_gzip, it's pumping around 1.5GB/day). All contentes are dynamically generated ... But server load does indeed go beyond my belief, especially when the number of people online on the two forums are around 400-500+ .... At this peak time, guess what! I still have 1GB of free memory! Here is what I think happening:

1. At one point, your CPU will be queieng more and more tasks (it takes time for CPU to execute the tasks) and this will increase your CPU Load and makes your server slowere over time.
2. IDE drive is taking CPU resources too! And IDE is just and IDE! After a while, with all the apache and mysql logging, httpd read/write, mysql query/read/write, and all other files processes, your IDE will become the source of the bottleneck (pray for your 5400rpm drives at this time).
3. Some other reasons that I can't think off right now ...

Basically, I am not sure how good will your raq do. Adding more memory is a way to improve everything but do expect that it may not solve your problems ... AMD K6 is even worse than P3 (not to mention the clock speed) ... Your IDE drive is, I believe, 5400 rpms ... At one time, your raq will just won't do the job (or else, I will move my sites to these raqs).

I am building Dual P3/866 Mhz with 4GB of memory and 2x18GB 10k SCSI (the two drives is intended so that I can split mysql and http on two drives to reduce any bottleneck)! Now, I hope the dual processor and the 10K SCSI drives will solve all the bottleneck ... less improvement will be expected from the 4GB memory ... I think even at peak time I will have 2-3 GB of free memory ...

Just my two cents ...

cheers,
:beer:

Originally posted by dektong
everybody always seems to say that getting more RAM will make a server becomes much better! Well, it does ... but more RAM may not help it .... I learn this by having a direct experience with my server ... Currently I have P3/850 (dual capable) with 2GB of memory and 30GB 7200rpm HD ... I though .. well, with 2GB memory, the servre is powerfull enough to handle anything ...
Not true ... I host two very busy VB forums with around 600 thousands hits per day and around 100 thousands page views ... pumping around 4-5GB of transfer per day (thanks to mod_gzip, it's pumping around 1.5GB/day). All contentes are dynamically generated ... But server load does indeed go beyond my belief, especially when the number of people online on the two forums are around 400-500+ .... At this peak time, guess what! I still have 1GB of free memory! Here is what I think happening:

1. At one point, your CPU will be queieng more and more tasks (it takes time for CPU to execute the tasks) and this will increase your CPU Load and makes your server slowere over time.
2. IDE drive is taking CPU resources too! And IDE is just and IDE! After a while, with all the apache and mysql logging, httpd read/write, mysql query/read/write, and all other files processes, your IDE will become the source of the bottleneck (pray for your 5400rpm drives at this time).
3. Some other reasons that I can't think off right now ...

Basically, I am not sure how good will your raq do. Adding more memory is a way to improve everything but do expect that it may not solve your problems ... AMD K6 is even worse than P3 (not to mention the clock speed) ... Your IDE drive is, I believe, 5400 rpms ... At one time, your raq will just won't do the job (or else, I will move my sites to these raqs).

I am building Dual P3/866 Mhz with 4GB of memory and 2x18GB 10k SCSI (the two drives is intended so that I can split mysql and http on two drives to reduce any bottleneck)! Now, I hope the dual processor and the 10K SCSI drives will solve all the bottleneck ... less improvement will be expected from the 4GB memory ... I think even at peak time I will have 2-3 GB of free memory ...

Just my two cents ...

cheers,
:beer:


I thought ram was used to limit disk access. I thought if you have enough ram you will eventually have very little disk access. Aren't the most recently requested files kept on ram? I am hoping to start a freehost. Was planning to put 2 Gig of ram in each server but decided to go with 4 Gig since I want to limit the amount of harddrive access. With Dual P3T and setting up a cluster or server farm. Thats the only obstacle I have besides selecting a freehost with secure ftp support. Major headache configuring it.

Originally posted by ClusterMania
I thought ram was used to limit disk access. I thought if you have enough ram you will eventually have very little disk access. Aren't the most recently requested files kept on ram?

Yes, of course.
But one problem is all those content and logs written to the disk. RAM only helps with reads a lot, the writes are buffered but they have to be done (hopefully :) ).
And with a heavy used forum there are many writes...

Originally posted by dektong I am building Dual P3/866 Mhz with 4GB of memory and 2x18GB 10k SCSI (the two drives is intended so that I can split mysql and http on two drives to reduce any bottleneck)! [/B]

Dektong, just my .2: don't forget to mount a dual-controler SCSI card in your PC, so that each HD will have its own wiring and its own channel, or you'd defeat the whole purpose of having two disks ;)

Originally posted by cyansmoker
don't forget to mount a dual-controler SCSI card in your PC, so that each HD will have its own wiring and its own channel, or you'd defeat the whole purpose of having two disks

Hm. Of course a second controller or channel will help, but with only two disks one channel should be doing fine.

Originally posted by Walter


Yes, of course.
But one problem is all those content and logs written to the disk. RAM only helps with reads a lot, the writes are buffered but they have to be done (hopefully :) ).
And with a heavy used forum there are many writes...

Would it be a good idea to have a seperate harddrive for logs to be written to, user accounts and e-mail? The 1U only fits 2 harddrives. Was thinking about using the second as a clone of the first.

Originally posted by ClusterMania
Would it be a good idea to have a seperate harddrive for logs to be written to, user accounts and e-mail? The 1U only fits 2 harddrives. Was thinking about using the second as a clone of the first.

That depends on your goals. Distributing the load against two disks instead of one will help a lot, but a backup drive is a very nice thing.
BTW, there are 1U cases with more than 1 drive bay, e.g. 4 drives. This way you could distribute the load and have a backup harddisk.

Originally posted by ClusterMania
Go to www.crucial.com and order some ram for the it. Its pretty damn cheap. The more ram the better =) Overkill is better than serverkill

is it even possible to ADD ram to a raq box ?

i am asking because i don't know, i dont think you can?

I believe the max is two modules of 256 MB, so 512 is the max.

32MB of memory is definitely not enough for almost anything to function well.

The only function that memory really has is to load programs into it for execution. The more memory you have the more programs you can run at one time without swapping memory to disk. Which is good, because you want to avoid swapping.

But like dektong says, you still only have the one processor which has to take turns executing each process. You can never have too much memory, but you can have too many processes running at one time. But as long as you have too many processes, it's better that they're in resident memory than being swapped to disk each time.

The main reason for having more memory is for running many processes. You'll want to be running between 5-10 web server children, at around 5MB each (10 * 5 = 50) and maybe 3 mysql children (5 * 3 = 15). That's 65MB right there in idle processes.