I was just wondering if running a redhat server with zeus web server, if you have tons of ram since its so cheap is hard disk speed really important if everything should be able to be in ram?

And does anybody think that 7200 rpm scsi 2 hard disks are fast enough for a situation like this and wouldn't cause web speed when surfing pages on the box?

I feel ok about my box but never really understood the ram thing. Allot of hosting solutions actually have tons of space compared to the amount of ram being used and in these situations the server is probably constantly swapping loading files back and forth. But if you don't have much data and excess ram isn't everything in ram and ready for us and thus is speedier and allows the hard drives to rest more?

While a lot of RAM will help, your HD's are always going to be slower than RAM and the faster you can get them the better performance you will get. Granted, if you are serving static html then you won't notice much of an increse at all... but if you get into databases and scripts etc... then you will notice increases with 10k rpm or even 15k rpm scsi drives.

Regards,

Mike

Like Phiberop said, the faster the better; depending on what you have.

It depends.... are we talking 4GB of Dimms, or 256mb of Dimms.. everything is relative. Also, you wouldn't happen to be running a software RAID 1 on those two drives?? That will definately kill performance, and throughput. Howver, a good, fast HDD is AAAAAALWAYS cheaper than the equivalent capacity in memory.