By kpm on

Hi Drupalers,

We are going to be buying a dedicated server for our companies intranet site and I am interested in reading opinions on hardware requirements for a Drupal site that would be serving approximately 800 employees in various offices connected to a WAN (3 mbps up and down bandwidth) throughout North America. The Drupal site will be unifying and replacing the various wikis, bulletin boards, and static intranet pages we currently have in different locations on various LAMP and WAMP loaded older workstations. We would stick to as vanilla an install as possible but would be making use of a number of modules such as LDAP integration, taxonomy access control, tinyMCE wysiwyg, image assist, pathauto, calendar, cck, views, diff, etc. The server will be a WAMP set up on Server 2003. There is a lot of info about how to tune your server for optimization, but I am not familiar with any specifics on hardware for servicing that many users. Suggestions, links, and helpful hints greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Comments

kvaes’s picture

kvaes commented

It all depends on your infrastructure and how many active users you have... In general you won't need a powerhouse server for serving as a webserver. Yet I'dd suggest going for a linux brand (f.e. ubuntu or so), as it'll save you the windows 2003 license. But hey, I guess that's more me and my linux evangelism.

http://www.kvaes.be - http://www.artistiku.com - http://www.tuxsolutions.com

davesgonebananas’s picture

davesgonebananas commented

It all depends on the load that will be placed on the web server. 800 users isn't a lot - but they could be constantly accessing the site or using it once a day. There is a big difference there.

The overriding factor with WAMP servers (and most database driven applications) is RAM. Each concurrent page request will use RAM. Drupal will create a connection to the database, which uses more RAM. And finally MySQL will use all the RAM you throw at it. Having more RAM means MySQL can keep more data close at hand, so make sure your server has as much RAM as you can afford.

Secondly disks. Most servers use SCSI disks but some come with SATA which offer fair performance at a cheaper price. In general SCSI drives are manufactured with enterprise grade components whilst most SATA drives are of consumer quality. Whichever you go for, the biggest performance benefit comes from keeping your system, temporary and paging files on a separate drive to your MySQL data files. Using RAID can boost read/write performance but is usually only beneficial in larger applications. Bear in mind that RAID can keep your server running in the event of a disk failure, so if the site is mission critical it is worth investing in. Don't make the mistake of thinking that because you have RAID you don't need to backup - I have seen two physical disks in the same array fail several times (often because one disk failed and the customer didn't bother to replace it).

Finally CPU. The CPU is usually the last thing to bottleneck on a web server. The general rule when serving a high number of concurrent users is, more processors is better than one faster processor.

kpm’s picture

kpm commented

It looks like the site will be used by 1200 now rather than the original 800 mentioned... so I will definetly be looking at all the RAM we can muster, raid, and multi processors rather than a single fast one.