Minimum Server for PHP & MySQL

Anon

I'm building a website that will be fully database fuelled: articles, sections, search, etc. Everything (besides templates) is pulled out of the database. So the question is:
How big of a server do I need?

I don't think processor speed will be too much of an issue, but I believe RAM will, and definately hard drive speed. Will the following be enough? Or overkill?
RedHat 6.2
PHP 4.01pl2
MySQL 3.23.22
P-Pro 166
64 megs ram
10 gig IDE 5400rpm drive

Are there any other bottlenecks I should be aware of? Thanks in advance.

-Doug

Anon

You left out the important facts, like how much traffic do you expect to receive? How complex are your pages and queries? How large is the database (now and in the future)?

The setup you described will handle most of the sites I've built, but I have very limited traffic.

If you think drive speed is an issue get 7200 RMP ATA/33 or ATA/66 drive/controller/cable setups. If disk I/O is truly massive, go for SCSI RAID.

You should also consider the bandwidth available to/from your site. If it is very limited, it won't matter how many hits your server can serve. The hits simply won't be able to reach you.

Anon

Sorry about the traffic info. The site gets typically 8000 pageviews per day with 95000 hits per day.

The code is mostly simple requests, except for the navigation bar, which is created from a series of requests, because of the way it unfolds. I store Section ids (sid) and Parent Secion ids (psid), and create the section dynamically, thru a recursive loop. Needless to say, this is very costly.
The database itself is small right now, but it only contains articles (about 40), but the articles can easily expand up to 200 or more. Eventually I will be adding comments to articles, polls, and forums to the package.

And lastly, bandwidth won't be an issue, as we are hosted by somebody with 3 T1's.

Let me know if there is anything else you need to know to make a good assesement.

Anon

Your configuration will probably work just fine for the traffic you describe. If the navbar query becomes a problem then try more RAM (this is easiest), or work to optimize/reduce the queries involved. It is also possible that the query could become CPU bound in which case a faster CPU would help.

I built a site serving 3000+ views per day (every hit requires mySQL queries) on a lowly PPro 180MHz w 32MB of RAM (Linux/MySQL/PHP4/Apache). The only time response is affected is during the processing of the log files (a very CPU/Memory intensive task). But this only happens once a week for 15 minutes, so I don't worry about it. My database is fairly small, being purely text, so your milage may vary.