The hard drive subsystem will be pricey because I'm going with a RAID 5 setup and the fastest hard drives I can get. Which'll likely mean 15k-rpm SCSI's.
Our current database server is a 1.9Ghz P4 with 1.5G of memory. Memory is the main bottleneck right now, but for full-text searches, the CPU is becoming a bottleneck, too.
The reason memory is a bottleneck is that the database is nearly 2 gig in size now, so cache hits are dropping. I'm not sure how large the full-text index is, but I'm sure it's at least several hundred meg. I prefer to always have enough memory to hold *all* of the data that will be used, which tends to keep cache hits in the 99%+ area, with the hard drive only being hit on writes.
The SuperMicro machine I'm looking at can hold 12 gig of memory. I'm starting it out with 4 gig. Of course, using large enough sticks that I don't have to replace them with larger ones if I want 12 gig. This thing has a bunch of memory slots.
I prefer full-size machines. Not rackmounts. Easier to work on when the need arises and the parts are generally more readily available.
The SuperMicro machine I'm tentatively planning to get is identical to the machine to the left of the monitor in the following picture. It's our current webserver. Space is not a consideration at this ISP, that machine can be rackmounted if I really want to mount it that way, and if it were using a RAID setup, the drives would be easily hot-swapped.
The machines on the lower shelf are the old webserver (currently not used but running, just in case) and the current database server.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
