I'm looking for some cues on how to calculate my needs in terms of server. I've been looking around about performance and scaling, pressflow/mercury and some study cases but it is puzzling and it seems there is no way to evaluate but just guessing. Hopefully, someone in this forum might have experience with similar config.
Drupal 6, Main modules include Ubercart&cie, Panels, Views, CCK&cie, Content profile, Taxonomy&cie, Rules, Workflow, Apache Solr, Simplenews/mimemail. On server : webmin, tomcat(solr), smtp, centos
About 35K members
About 2000 new nodes per month
Peak : april/may 5000 visits/day (anonymous) + 1000visits/day(authenticated)
Normal charge : january/march 3000visits/day + 700visits/day(authenticated)
Low charge : june/december 500visits/day + 50visits/day(authenticated)
I'm trying to figure out a budget for the hosting. Would a 2x Xeon Quad 2.13Ghz with 18 Gb of ram, APC, memcache would be enough ? Is it overkill ? Would I be better going with Pressflow/Mercury? Or am I completely wrong and need to go for a Master/Slave DB with a webserver, a DB server, a CDN, Varnish, Load balancer, round robin, etc ?
Anyone willing to share some info about hosting at this scale ?
Chris