hello there!

I have a very general question which is basically about hardware. I'm wondering what would be a good setup for a site with about 600-700k impressions/month and 20-25gb of transfer... I would also consider hosting 10-25 small sites to pay for the box.

Right now I'm hosted on Celeron 500 with 128MB... it seems ok, but some MySQL queries take 100% of CPU time for a couple of minutes (ie generating statistic report). At the moment I'm having only 400k impressions but the site is getting more popular each day...

I was looking at getting a RaQ4i, but found out that maintance and software installation is a big pain, so I'm looking at something PC/intel based.

Any suggestions and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

A faster CPU would help you, but I'm betting that one of your biggest bottlenecks with that MySQL query is disk. Your system, if typical, is running an IDE disk. IDE just kills the system's performance under load. Its only advantage is that it's cheaper.

I'll bet if you were using even a similarly configured system, but with SCSI (or a RAID 5 array, even better), you'd see a lot of improvement in performance on that query.

Alternatively, some extra RAM may help if the database is small enough that the system could cache it while querying. (Assuming it's mostly querying, and not updating.)

i'm sure that exactly the reason :)