Hello guys. I want to host a large site in a new dedicated server. The site has almost 500,000-600,000 impressions/month and uses mySQL. i have to choose between AMD Duron 1GHz 512 MB RAM and AMD Duron 1GHz 1GB RAM. I know that 1GB RAM will be the best solution, but what about 512 MB RAM? Can this RAM handle the site? Thanx!

512 MB will probably do you well, but with the prices of memory on the rise I would get 1 GB RAM now as it's going to get expensive soon.

I suggest you start with 512 and see the server load and performance and then upgrade to 1GB when you feel the performance is not upto the mark...

All server processes love more RAM - also there are a good many ways of tuning an RDBMS so it can perform much better on the same hardware....

Use of a dB by itself is no great overhead.. it depends on what kind of SQL's are run and if there is room for cahing your dB buffers so your sessions can be lighter and less frequent etc.,

Do you run many processor intensive scripts?

600K hits can be handled by 512MB RAM is what this fool thinks.. How many simultaneous threads [max] do you expect? Or would all users be accessing in a specific peak time zone [like a newspaper site on the morning time ]?

But RAM is cheap and tuning is expensive is what my DBA often quips!

Cheers
Balaji

MotleyFool,

Not 600k hits but 600k impressions (pageviews). The hits will be much more. Ok guys, I think I'll start with 512MB and I'll upgrade when it's necessary. Thanx!

For the price of RAM at the moment ~$100-150 for the additional 512M - then it's probably a good investment to go to 1G right from the start.

We are hosting a site now with over a million page views per month on a 512mb ram server... the site loads fast and no one is complaining..

max cpu usage is .05

Unless your site gets more than a million page views p/month I doubt u need 1000mb of ram.. of course that is unless your site uses a lot of php, perl.. or it's a forum board..

Go with the Gig, as and this is a hypothetical, but possibly your hosting company could put you on a different motherboard if you go with the 512 and potentially later you would not only need to upgrade the RAM to a Gig, but also the motherboard. If this hadn't just happened to one of my clients today I wouldn't have even thought about it.

I will suggest to start with 1GB, you can get extra 512MB for cheapo right now. After it will cost extra to ship it, extra charge for installation (not to mention problems if you order non-registered memory, but motherboard accepts only registered RAM :)) and of course downtime while a tech dude is installing it.

For best prices you may want to check out http://www.pricewatch.com/

Thank you guys for your interest. The site is a large discussion board. To be more specific, I'm interested for the Rackshack Linux boxes.

GO with the higher memory, neven know when u might need it. What if you want to open two boards up.. heh..

RAM is very cheap now, so you might aswell go for 1GB. The more RAM the better for MySQL sites. Is it me or when I first read this post that I automatically thought 'Rackshack server', LOL?

But 512MB will certainly support that kind of traffic, it all realy depends HOW MANY database connections each page has and also how much data is being transferred, so it's quite hard to tell if 512MB or 1GB is more suitable from just page impressions.

We have a LOT more impressions than that and we use quite a lot of database connections on each page, our server has 512MB RAM and it's doing fine with plenty of room more to expand on traffic/users.

Alan

Unless your site has been writen by an incredibly clean and carring coder, it is optimal to go with 1 GB Ram. SQL queries tend to take up good amounts of RAM, and proccessor load. Ask the coder of your site if he uses bind columns, if the answer is yes then 512 MB should be satisfactory. If he does not say yes, it is *necessary* that you go with 1 GB RAM for good performance.

The key becomes good code, and that's something hard to find. Most people who code are self learners who don't read perldocs enough ;) This means that they're going to code "sloppy", now sloppy works fine (many of the best scripts are coded sloppy) but it's a bit more rescourse intensive than most people would like. CGI/SQL generally merrits 1 GB of RAM.

My site generates 5 million page impressions (PHP/MySQL) per month and the performance is excellent with 512 Mb.

If you have lots of traffic the harddisk is more likely to become the bottleneck instead of the 512 Mb. The same applies if your scripts use heavy queries on large tables. In this case it helps to get more memory but still your harddisk will become the bottleneck.