WebServer - What is most important?

[Duki]

Hey everyone, I'm not sure where to post this so feel free to move if needed.

A fellow classmate and myself are starting on message board project. I was asked to spec a powerful windows based system, but am unsure of what is most important in a web server?

Could someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks! :mrgreen:

[Dani]

RAM and the speed of the hard drives???

[Duki]

alright, so CPU isn't a big factor when specing out a web server?

[manofgames]

Well, I'd imagine it is actually, after all if a cpu is the computer's 'brain' then there's no point giving a supposedly suped up server a tiny amount of processing power.

[jbennet]

i disagree

I run a web server happily on 128mb ram and 2x 233mhz pentium IIs

Main thing is fast HDDs / NICs and reliable

Well, I'd imagine it is actually, after all if a cpu is the computer's 'brain' then there's no point giving a supposedly suped up server a tiny amount of processing power.

manofgames is almost quite correct in his statement. There are many factors that will ultimately determine the performance of a web server. A web server utilizes a vast amount of hardware components. Ultimately, a bottleneck in a single component can drastically affect your overall web server's performance.

What hardware you require will depend on how you are using the site and how many visitors you expect to serve.

As per Apache's page on 'Apache Performance Tuning', "The single biggest hardware issue affecting webserver performance is RAM." It carries on further and says, "Beyond that the rest is mundane: get a fast enough CPU, a fast enough network card, and fast enough disks, where 'fast enough' is something that needs to be determined by experimentation."

GCS584

[brit]

It depends what kind of pages do you want to host. If you don't serve databases, then cpu could be not so much important, but in any other case, better be prepared for 'heavy' sites.

[jbennet]

256+ ram is needed for SQL unless you want to get errors