[consulting] Drupal server requirements

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Clara Hurst wrote:

> We are writing a proposal for a client site with potential of  100,000 
> unique visitors per months.  The registered site users can be ranging 
> from a few thousands to 10,000.   However, we expect at any given time 
> there might be only up to a couple hundreds active users logged in,


You mean they actually logged in and do something or there is just an 
active session hanging around in the database? This is a major difference.

>   the activities that the logged in users will do will mainly be:  
> posting content, private messaging/contacting each others and 
> downloading some white papers from the site etc.   We will use Organic 
> Groups module so user roles are controlled via OG,


No, node access  is controlled via OG. :p

> we will also have multi-lingual support in the near future.
>
> We have not built any large drupal sites before, although there are 
> some posts on the drupal.org but still feel very unease in terms of 
> coming up with a set of server capacity requirements, any pointers or 
> suggestions will be greatly appreciated. We are thinking of the 
> following dedicate server configuration as a start, are we on track or 
> too far off?
>
> - Intell 3.2 GHz P4 processor
> - 2GB RAM
> - plenty disk space
> - RAID 1 for redundancy


If you really have 100eds of active users doing stuff, it looks to me 
like it very likely will not suffice. I am not an expert, though. 
Drupal.org runs on better hardware (own db server for example) and has 
not as many really active users.

Cheers,
    Gerhard