Greetings,

I'm looking for some suggestions on server hardware configurations... The server will be used for archiving, displaying and searching through images from 20 or so newspapers. Once things are up and running, 20+k unique hits a day can be expected. Approx. 280 new Images will be uploaded to the server daily and will need to be processed by a script on the server.

As far as what will run on the server; we are looking at a configuration of FreeBSD, Apache, PHP & MySQL. Any suggestions for optimal hardware configurations?

Thanks! :)

20k+ hits a day....

If it's just one server... It's gotta be a big one...

Disk drives... SCSI... RAID, Level 5 if you can afford it. 0+1 would work fine.

Proccessors... I would go for a mid-range dual server... Dual 600's...

RAM.... Don't skimp on this. Get good brand RAM. I've had RAM fail on one of my activily queried servers that was serving large files.

The people funding the project would probably be willing to spend between $3 - $5k on two servers.. I was thinking something along the lines of dual PIII 750, 1.5 GB ram and 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, at least 72 GB worth of file space.. Does that sound like a good start?

What brand of motherboard should we be looking for? I used to hear good things about Tyan boards.. but i have read some recent bad reviews. Lately I have been hearing good things about Epox and MSI. Are either of them worth looking into? Will a dual PIII setup be enough or should we be looking at higher end servers?

Thanks! :)

I"ve used Asus & Epox in single CPU settings... Never had one one glitch with either of them.

I've heard good things about Tyan but, never used em...

What you've stated as your desired set-up sounds like about what I would shoot for... If your custom building it (i.e. not just custom configuring it from a manuactorer) I would also be sure to get a few drive bay fans for the SCSI drives.

My file server's drives sometimes get a little toasty after running rull boar for a while.....

But, it really sounds like you've already got a great system planned. It seems to be fitting your needs quite well...

Also remember to get a good NIC card('s), another thing not to skimp on b/c that would be a bad place to have a bottleneck. Especially if your serving media files...



btw.. Woo 300 :beer: