I'm putting together a quote to setup a CMS (joomla probably) and a VLE (moodle) for a local school (UK). There will be about 2,000 users. All of their servers at the moment are Windows. I've suggested that they use a Linux based server for the web site/vle. However, I don't know what to advise them regarding the spec of the server. CPU? RAM? Does anyone have any guidance/suggestions on this?
I dont know joomla... but try to have the biggest number of cores availlables, for concurency of requests. And RAM is very important for web servers.... 6 GO minimum to have the biggest pool of ready process waiting for requests... I also recommend you to install eaccelerator to enhance PHP performance by a very good factor! Another trick is to separate the database and webserver on two different hosts! It will be easier to scale up and find bottleneck...
zonzon - thanks for your reply. I'm not very technical when it comes to hardware so please can you (or someone else) explain to me what you mean by "try to have biggest number of cores available"? Do you mean that the server's processor needs to be dual core? What is 6 GO? Would a server spec of Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz with 1GB and 250GB HDD be sufficient? Is that overkill or not enough resources? Sorry, I really have no idea! In theory, although not likely, there could be up to 2000 users at any one time.
You must prefer Quad Cores over and Dual Cores over Singles Cores... because the main task of a web server is to server many clients at a time! Same thing for another multi-{thread/process} application like your MySQL. I know that's more expensive, but I promise you that you'll never be unsatisfied. It's a vendor benchmark, but you can loot at this : http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/web.htm Scuse me for the 1GO, it the french abreviation for GB. For 2000 concurent user, please split Database/Web Server! and 1 GB will never be enough...! The calculation can vary from Multi-Processing Module (MPM) to another (I think so), but in a rule of thumb for the MPM Prefork that is safier, you must calculate the config MaxClients (2000) * Size of each process = Needed RAM. The size of each process depend on OS and on which modules you activate under apache as shared object or directly built in. For me at job, a single process with php4 enabled take in average 35MB... If I do 35MB * 2000 = 70000MB / 1024 = 68 GB If you really have 2000 concurent user you'll need a better architecture with load balancing, sets of frontends, backends, set of lightweight servers (images,documents) for static content, set of heavyweight servers (php, perl, cgi) for the dynamic content... you can recall me if I'm wrong For the database...How big will be the database? Indexes vs Data? it's better for database optimisation to keep all the database indices fit in RAM.... be sure to differentiate registered users (2000) vs concurent users (2000), because I dont think that 2000 registered will use your site at the same time!!! hope that helps you
Yea...even DP has less than 1500 concurrent users for most of the times. I think a dual core opteron with 2-4GB RAM and 2xSATA HDD RAID will be enough for you.