Curious as to how important different hardware aspects are when it comes to dedicated and co-located servers.. Obviously we all know the importance of RAM and computer speed, but what about the smaller details..

- Hard Drive (SCSI vs. IDE and 7,200 RPM vs 10000 RPM vs 15k RPM)
- Memory Speed (PC133 vs PC2100 DDR and so forth)
- Onboard network card vs standard PCI network card

Obviously, given the above the 15k SCSI hard drive with PC2100 DDR RAM and a regular network card will outperform the lesser of the two, but by how much?

I guess it all comes down to where the bottlenecks are. So, as an inexperienced server manager, what typically are the biggest bottlenecks for servers?

Andrew

Originally posted by Rebies
Curious as to how important different hardware aspects are when it comes to dedicated and co-located servers.. Obviously we all know the importance of RAM and computer speed, but what about the smaller details..

- Hard Drive (SCSI vs. IDE and 7,200 RPM vs 10000 RPM vs 15k RPM)
- Memory Speed (PC133 vs PC2100 DDR and so forth)
- Onboard network card vs standard PCI network card

Obviously, given the above the 15k SCSI hard drive with PC2100 DDR RAM and a regular network card will outperform the lesser of the two, but by how much?

I guess it all comes down to where the bottlenecks are. So, as an inexperienced server manager, what typically are the biggest bottlenecks for servers?

Andrew

I'd have to say the Bus speed. You gotta start at the root. Look out for the FSB of a montherboard. 400MGz FSB is what you want. You can put in a 1.7GHZ chip but if the bus is slow your chip means nothing. You want your server running at maximum capacity if it needs it. :)

And RAM - Get the fastest possible type of RAM on the market - many people think an extra processor does the trick, but RAM is where all the power of multitasking is at, especially if you run a windows server. :)

With plenty of RAM, you probably won't need the SCSI disk system unless you plan on hosting more than just a couple hundred domains on the server.

It depends a lot on the OS though. A Windows based system will rely more heavily on the disk system than a Unix-like OS, provided you have plenty of RAM.

If you plan on using a lot of swap space, the SCSI disk system will help free up the CPU to work on more important tasks.

Biggest bottle neck is your harddrive. Both in seek times and STR.