Upgrading Server...

[Ocean West]

My current dedicated* server is

8 Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3470 @ 2.93GHz 1200.000 MHz Cache 8192 KB and currently has 8GB of RAM.

I am considering upgrading the RAM to 16GB and also adding in an 128GB SSD where I plan to put my home directory and the databases on, to optimize performance, and hopefully speed up the upgrade process.

Server dedicated to my forums but I have a few small hosting clients nothing really resource intensive.

Pros, Cons, observations, and suggestions welcomed! 

 

[ASTRAPI]

For the ram you can check how much ram you use now and if you really need some extra....

Also i don't know if you really need the ssd also as you say that the customers are not using a lot of resources but for sure both will help

[Makoto]

It's hard for us to tell you anything. You've listed us your servers specifications and nothing else.

What are your current traffic requirements? Are you currently experiencing server performance issues? How much RAM are you currently utilizing on the server? How much memory do you have dedicated to MySQL? Other processes?

But with what little information you have provoded, here are the pros and cons to upgrading,

Pros:  Improved performance

Cons: You pay more

If you just want a general performance imprpvement and can comfortably invest in the upgrade, go for it. SSD's are absolutely one of the easiest and best upgrades for any web or database server.

More RAM is good even if you're not using it all, it won't be completely wasted if you're not using it anyways, free memory is used for disk caching. You probably want to consider dedicating some of this extra memory somewhere though of course, particularly towards the database server.

[Ocean West]

sorry I didn't think to provide more details of course it is Sunday so things are light today, haven't looked at logs during load in awhile.  

Thanks for your feedback -  it's only $35 per month extra for ram/drive upgrade so think it should be a good investment. 

[Makoto]

Sure, like I said you'll want to tune and configure your server to make best use of the new hardware, but I'd definitely support the upgrade.

Ideally I'd recommend having your OS installed on the SSD and using the HDD for file storage (i.e. attachment/IP.Downloads/IP.Gallery uploads) if you can.

[Ocean West]

oh wow - just added the SSD and moved the SQL databases over - you can really feel the difference.

 

[wimg]

Yep :). And congrats!

When we upgraded, page loads got about 20-30 times faster at busy times, going from RAID-10 spindles to RAID-10 SSDs. And funnily enough, the cost was slightly less :).

Kind regards, Wim

[AlexJ]

I would suggest 2 SSD instead of one in RAID 1. Although SSD are reliable now a days but if something goes wrong you are left with loss of data unless you take back up every 1-6 hour.

[wimg]

Actually, from what I've read and have been told in discussions with the technical guys, SSDs currently are at least 3X more reliable currently than spindles are, and that is a very conservative estimate based on "cheap" Samsung devices. In real life reliability appears to be 10X as good.

Just make sure you have a RAID-10 setup or something that creates backups in some way or another - but that is true for spindles too.

Kind regards, Wim