Looking for system hardware recommendations

B

baos

I am building a server which will primarily run just PHP, SQL and Apache. It will never have a monitor attached. CPU/RAM should be reasonable. I need places to look for stuff to buy.
 
As per the above, we have no idea what you define as "reasonable", what the size of your data set is, how many hits you're looking at getting, etc.

You can run the above on an old Pentium 2 with 64 MB of RAM if you wanted to.
 
baos said:
I am building a server which will primarily run just PHP, SQL and Apache. It will never have a monitor attached. CPU/RAM should be reasonable. I need places to look for stuff to buy.
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Business or personal?

US or not? Shipping hardware from the US to Elbonia probably isn't practical.

Never have a monitor? Will you never do upgrades after installing, or are you expecting working remote management hardware?

Having said all that, a relatively recent Dell server system (PowerEdge generation 10, 11, or 12) is often a good solution, and often available inexpensively on eBay. The 11th generation (Rx10, Tx10) models introduced some substantial energy savings. I've got a monster R710 (2 x E5620, 24GB RAM, 6 x 300GB 15K SAS drives, etc.) which idles at around 210W. In fact, that one was in a scrap recycling pile at a datacenter I have equipment in, so it didn't cost me anything, other than the parts I upgraded / added later. Many of these systems still have a year or more left on their [transferrable] warranties.
 
I had never used any of their stuff, I didn't even know they existed. But the company I'm contracted to uses a lot of SuperMicro 1U rack mount servers. They're not that expensive and run FreeBSD quite well. Several models also have IPMI for remote management. Although I haven't used IPMI in combination with FreeBSD yet it should work.
 
I get a hit about every two seconds which collects data in gzip form for processing if it can. I have two, let's say, robots that run processing it when they can. I truncate the table every 15 minutes because it gets out of control and grows too large. I also have a day turnover process that takes about four hours to complete on a good day. And right now MySQL gives errors about being out of memory.

Currently it's running on old hardware. I have an AMD3 Athlon II quad core 2.8 GHz I'm thinking of using, maybe 16 gigs GB of RAM to replace the two it's running on now. I would like to stay as low on power consumption as possible as it is the ISP's primary concern. I would prefer to start with a motherboard that doesn't have me paying for extras like graphics,sound. I'm also planning to use the neutron GTX for the MySQL database, so SATA-3 is a must.
 
Hello @baos,

I've just seen your thread. I've some suggestions to you with my experience. You've noted that this will be an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) server. If your website gets 0.5 hits (not requests) per second, you don't need huge resources for average applications. We're getting about 1000 PHP requests (all of the requests also connects to the MySQL server) per second for each server, which has about 4 GiB RAM in average. In my opinion, the important thing is improving your application's code. The better code, the lower resources.

You said that you will use SSD for MySQL. But you've also noted that you will truncate a shortly growing MySQL table in every 15 minutes. This means you will write a lot of data to your SSD and after 15 minutes you will remove them. So many writes and deletes will cause your SSD to die after a short period. After a time, this SSD will be useless. I suggest SSD for reading queries only. To add, I suggest MEMORY table type for this table (to be truncated every 15 minutes) and have enough RAM to store the table. This may give better results. Also, use as many indexes as you can for the tables.

For the hardware, I suggest entry level professional servers to start with. New Xeon CPUs has very low power consumption and ECC RAMs are a must. If you're thinking to go with OEM PC parts, I strongly suggest Asus motherboards, Kingston HyperX RAMs, SeaGate HDDs, Intel SSDs (Intel SSD 320 has good features) and Intel network cards. To add, server cooling is very important for both performance and health of the instruments. Do not ignore using fans.

Good luck.
 
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