server question.

My friend and I are looking into buying a new server to run a PHP/HTML site with some really detailed interactive flash.
We are leaning towards an AMD machine. Our current thought is a dual opteron board with about a gig of ecc memory.

Currently were are running a PHP forum, and a html web-site from a intel celeron 733 Mhz and it can't cut the cheese.

Would a dual 1.6Ghz operton run the forum with ease?
I am very new to serving, and was surprised that a 733 couldn't handle it.

Thanks for your time,

Kris

Depends how many visitors you have but a dedicated 733MHz should have been more than enough for all your needs but have you tried moving from Access db to SQL or even SQL back to Access (Access can be faster for low traffic!).

Flash does not usually require any significant server side unless connecting to databases.

Also your image on every page is very large but I dont think that effects it much.

How much RAM have you got?

yeah, databases are more ram dependant that cpu dependant

There is ~390MB in the machine, but it's running at a slow bus speed(PC100 memory on a 66 MHz bus). So what you are saying is a dual opteron server with 4GB of ram should be enough to serve a PHP forum? Cool! Thanks for your help!

Depends how much traffic you get and by looking at your site I think your forum should run fine on your current spec. Your server is not shared is it???

What do you mean shared?

The forum gave me MySQL errors when using a computer lab, we had 19-22 students hit the site at one time. The forum wouldn't let them register, and links were working like molassas. The HTTP portion of the web-site was working fine though, so I took it to be a server hardware problem.

Is the server shared with other resources and so NOT a dedicated server for running that one website and PHP forum.

It runs for the sole purpose of hosting the web-site...

Then that should do the job, your server must not be set up correctly?

I have a question...we had it resolving the domain name to a IP address then we got it changes to a doman like comp3.en.ka.com and it so much faster to reslove the PHP and a little slower to resolve HTML pages...why is this?

I like opteron for the sole fact that datbases take full advantage of the 64 bit processing arcitecture, therefore reducing the load time, and increasing the speed of page loads.

I know nothing about the web side if things, but presuming this all runs on an OS of some kind? if its running on Windows 2000 Server, then that don't even get out of bed in the morning for less than 500MB RAM! One of my home servers that has similar spec grinds like a (er) grindy thing with less than 750MB and thats before I even get it doing anything.

S

something's wrong... I have a server with dual pentium pro's @ 200MHZ with 128mb of ram running a forum with no prob and a fair number of visitors... I think your problems are most likely related to server setup...