Best practice CPU and memory per user session?

[whittleroot.com]

My team is preparing to evaluate Sugar Professional with an expected load of 100 users broken out as follows:

40 heavy users
40 medium users
20 light weight users

Our customer base is stable at about 1K accounts with about 10K contacts. Our plan is to use the email and activities modules to track our conversations with customers.

Our software stack will be Linux running on a multi-core 64-bit Intel server with the Zend Server AMP stack.

Are there any best practice guidelines on how to size our server(s) to match a specific number of users/sessions?

By size our servers I'm talking about CPU's (cores) and RAM.

Thank you!
Brett

[kbrill]

Well, the best advise I can give you is go as big as you can afford. PHP likes CPU power over Memory so Xenon quad cores or better would be the gold standard. Databases like memory, so don't skimp there, for 40 power users I would say start at 4G but 6G might be nicer. If you run the DB on another server then you can go with 4G on each. There isnt a set in stone doc as the subject is just too subjective to set in stone.

In the end these are just guesses, like I said, for a system this large go for as much as you can afford. If I were doing it I would probably go with 2 machine configured like this

* 2 Quad Core Intel L5520
* 6GB RDIMM (DB) - 4GB RDIMM (web)
* 2x146G, 15K, SAS, 3.5 (RAID)

[whittleroot.com]

Hi Ken,

Thank you very much for your help!

Memory is cheap, so we were thinking along the lines of a 2 quad-core 64-bit server with 32 Gb RAM with our app server and database server split into 2 separate servers running as VM's. If we continue to grow and need to scale, we would move one of these VM's to another physical box.

Regards,
Brett