[consulting] Server Specs

[Fred Jones]

I am looking at site built by a Drupal newbie and I am trying to fix
it up. Truth is aside from the theme, the rest of the site appears
normal. And the theme I am fixing up.

Now the issue is a new server because the current server is quite
slow. The site gets around 200K pageviews a month, with a high day
getting 30K. I calculate that if we presume around 15 hours of that
day are busy, that's 2K per hour. That comes out to something like a
page every 2 seconds. I am not an expert in busy sites, but I think
this is not too bad actually and that any decent VPS or dedicated
server *should* be able to handle it.

I turned on devel and I see page execution times of 3 seconds on
average, however. I think that's very high. I will try to analyze if I
can and see what's slowing down this site, but in the meantime here
are my questions:

1. People agree that 3 seconds is very high? Yes, yes it depends on
the theme and modules etc. etc. The theme is (now) a fairly standard
Zen sub-theme, nothing special in particular. There are a lot of
modules but it seems that node pages render as fast as views pages.
There are now 30K nodes but I think they want to import a lot more.
The mysqldump file is around 650M. Not huge I think.

2. Can anyone give any advice regarding specs for a new server? Or at
least confirm that any reasonable machine with reasonable specs should
be OK?

Thanks,
Fred