[lug] server spec

[David L. Anselmi]

karl horlen wrote:
[...]
> I'm on a budget.  would like to stay under / around
> $1200 but will slide to around $1500 if needed.

What does your colo cost?  Seems to me it's in the $100+ per month in 
which case $1200-1500 is kind of cheap.  But whatever.

> - 2 disk sata raid 1 mirror (obviously not for speed -
> redundancy)

You didn't say HW RAID, that will cut into your cost.  But SW RAID seems 
to be a reasonable choice for cheap servers (mine are the $300 variety 
though).

> - Single P4 3G CPU on a mobo that can handle a dual
> cpu upgrade (my biggest dilemna.. not sure if single

Dell will sell you dual core PentiumD or up to quad core Xeons now.  Not 
in your budget, maybe.  Aren't there benchmarks out there that would 
help you rate Xeon vs. Core2 vs. dual CPU/core?  The SPEC people maybe.

[...]
> I'd really like to hear from people that have actually
> experienced or supported 100-500K+ page view per day
> loads in the real world.  otherwise i'm basically
> getting subjective / hypothetical opinions.  

I'd say you're better off talking to SAGE or LOPSA then.

> My tendency is to believe that with the right sw
> optimization, this kind of performance can be achieved
> with less than the avg person is marketed to believe
> they need (to pay for).

I'd say it's cheaper to buy more CPU/RAM/boxes than to spend a lot of 
time optimizing.  What exactly do you mean by sw optimization?

Good luck!  Your experience might make a good BLUG talk.  (And then you 
could do the circuit--CLUE, NCLUG, etc--and then you'd be famous! ;-)

Dave