I am researching MYSQL and I'm trying to find out what resources it uses on the server. I understand this is a very difficult question to answer because it depends on many factors like the server resources available, queries per minute, size of the queries, and the number of simultaneous connections. If we could get a few people on here to post their MySQL statistics I might be able to compare them and come up with a rough idea.

1 - Based on a single dedicated MySQL server running a minimal build of CentOS (or Unbuntu), how much RAM is likely to be used without the server being in use?

2 - As a "for-instance", if we took a VPS with 512MB running CentOS minimal, how much demand would MySQL handle? Like I said before I know there isn't specifics but I just want a rough idea if this would powered 10 average forums, or 100 average forums, 1000 average forums?

Thanks for the tiPS.

Hi,

What counts with MySQL is that your entire database should be able to fit in the RAM if you don't want any slow down. If it starts to read / write on the HDD, then it's slower. So, to answer your question, you need to tell us what will be the expected size of /var/lib/mysql, as the amount of RAM of your server should be at least as big.

Then comes queries with WHERE filters. Here, what's needed is correct indexes installed in your tables.

If you follow the above 2 rules, you can really load your server with lots of queries.

Thomas

It's hard to really determine what you will be able to do with the information provided. Not all VPS servers are created equal and as gplhost mentioned, how big is your database, additionally, how many visitors per day do you expect, etc..

I have seen a single forum slow to a crawl with 100 concurrent visitors on a 1GB server that had 15k RPM RAID 10 SAS disks.

Need to know what you are doing, how many concurrent visitors, etc...

Thanks for the advice.

As I am only researching at the moment I couldn't estimate the database size, or the concurrent connections.

If you don't really know what you are going to have, best is to start small, and scale to something bigger as you need it. Get a 512MB VPS, if it becomes too small, ask your hosting provider to make it grow to something bigger. If it becomes still too small with a VPS, then get a dedicated. If one unique server is not enough ... (I stop here you got my point...)