Hello:

Does anyone have any decent benchmarks or even just a rule-of-thumb on specing out dedicated web servers.

I'm looking at very simple requirements.
* traffic - 100,000 visitors/month
* phpBB forum
* light use of PHP for includes

I'm confident that this machine from rackspace with this spec will be sufficient:
OPERATING SYSTEM Red Hat Linux 7.2 Server
HARDWARE 650 MHz
256 MB RAM
HARD DRIVES 20 GB EIDE Drive

But as the site grows, what would be the limit of page views per month on this kind of server ? What is the bottleneck as it grows ?

thanks!

There is no set page limit on any box unless its some kind of resource intensive Perl script you use.

We did some benchmarking for a managed server customer with similar hardware last year: 600 mhz, 128RAM, apache with mod_php and mysql.

Page load times increased significantly around 6 requests/second.

In this case, the front page of the website being tested had about 4 mysql queries on it.

thanks for the info !

strange that in a world obsessed with benchamrks it's so hard to find any real numbers -- but your info helps --

cheers !