Hi,

I wonder how much better is a Pentium IV HT with 3 Ghz + 1 GB of RAM than a Celeron with 2.4 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM ?

Can you host like double the amount of customers on the PIV system (assuming that all customers use the same amount of system resources...I know they don't but now lets just assume they would all use the same) ?

I wonder would I be better of hosting double to amount of customers on a PIV than hosting the usual amount on the Celeron System... Because the PIV costs me twice as much...

Tom

Of course the faster machine is going to be better. However, it really comes back around to the age old question of what do you plan on doing with the server?

If you plan on hosting a few low resource sites then the Celeron would probably do and you most likely wouldn't gain much out of the faster machine. However, if you plan on running a couple of hundred database driven sites then the Pentium 4 would definitely have the edge.

Drop a reply and let us know what you plan on using the box for and your question can be better answered :)

- Chris

I just want to host my hosting customers on it... At present I am hosting like 300 customers per server on the Celeron systems and that works fine except for some high traffic sites that I need to move to other servers...
Now I wonder if I took a PIV could I host like 500 on it or something ?

As far as I know, while CPU and memory upgrades always help, your limiting factor may become the hard drive. I'd like to know myself how a celery fares compared to p4 ht though.

I would say you could hold an additional 200 to the original 300 with no problem. Hard drives as well as RAM will most likely be your bottleneck. May want to consider 1.5 GB RAM.

Originally posted by thomas.smith
Hi,

I wonder how much better is a Pentium IV HT with 3 Ghz + 1 GB of RAM than a Celeron with 2.4 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM ?


A lot of comparative benchmarks are posted in this thread:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=308055

Just wade through it all to find the kinds of systems you're looking for, and compare the numbers :)

It's a question of how much active content is on your server. If you have 300mb of files that get regularally accessed your 512mb celeron should do fine. If you have 1gb of php/images that are used a lot your celeron will be moving files in and out of the swap and it will slow down the system.

I good way to test is to do "free -m" if the buffers/cache has nothing free you probably need more ram and not a new cpu.

Think of it this way, if you have a 300mb page that everyone sees and no one sees anything else. That 300mb page will sit in your ram. If you have 512mb or ram and you have a 400mb page loaded on the server and its used just as much as the 300mb page you will have to move the 300mb page into the swap(disk usage), put the 400mb page in the ram and send it, then when someone requests the 300mb page again you will have to move the 400mb page into the swap(disk usage). Most people decide its not worth the time to figure out if they only need to buy more ram and just do full upgrades.

My experience is that if you are serving email, web, mysql and CP all in one server, you will max out around 50-100 clients on a celeron.

Originally posted by mcraft
My experience is that if you are serving email, web, mysql and CP all in one server, you will max out around 50-100 clients on a celeron.

Well, maybe with a Celeron 1.7/256 MB of RAM but definitely not with a Celeron 2.4/512. I have a celeron which does handle up to 30 requests per second. I even had to increase the maximum amount of Apache processes from 150 to 250 and its load was still below 0.5. It all depends on the sites you host I think. If you are hosting download pages or pages that use MySQL a lot you will get some trouble. But on a Celeron 2.4/512 you can easily host like 300 pages according to my experience.

Originally posted by thomas.smith
Well, maybe with a Celeron 1.7/256 MB of RAM but definitely not with a Celeron 2.4/512. I have a celeron which does handle up to 30 requests per second. I even had to increase the maximum amount of Apache processes from 150 to 250 and its load was still below 0.5. It all depends on the sites you host I think. If you are hosting download pages or pages that use MySQL a lot you will get some trouble. But on a Celeron 2.4/512 you can easily host like 300 pages according to my experience.

I am now using a celeron 2G 512MB 80G HD just for spam/anti-virus gateway. CPU usage drop to 50% idl on heavy use and average around 80% idl. I am passing around 200 activate domain names through this server. On the average my clients has about 25 email users/domain name.

I can't imagine if I have CP, web sites (some with mysql) and mailboxes in this same server.

But my P4 2.8G 1GB hosting all the 200 domain names with CP, web sites, mailboxes and heavy mysql sites, it is mostly 95% idl.

Just sharing my real experience not to prove anything. I agree that it depend how your clients use your service that will stress out your server.