server speed guidelines (GHz, MB RAM, # of cores, etc)

[steve123]

I have searched the forums and your site but can't find a good answer to this.

Earlier this year we tried to set up our 2nd first spot proxy. The traffic rate was 3 megabits per second of traffic in both directions. This completely overwhelmed a 1.5GHz P4 computer (99% CPU, very unresponsive), and we had to fall back to using a generic firewall.

We are going to try again, but I need some guidance on what server to buy. I want to support up to 10 megabits per second in each direction. Can you please provide a specification for what type of server to get? If First spot is single-threaded, is it better to get a faster single core machine?

We would like to get moving on this as soon as possible.

[alan]

Sizing is always more an art than exact science.

Note that FirstSpot has many threads (Dispatcher, DNS, DHCP, Apache, driver), so it will definitely benefit from multi-core CPU. For your case, I suggest you try a current Quad Core CPU with 2G RAM. This should give you some slack on the system.
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[steve123]

thank you, based on this information we are looking at a Dell R200 or R300, single quad core xeon 2.8GHz or faster with 2GB of RAM or more.

If I understand correctly 64 bit windows server is not supported, so we will select 32 bit Windows Server 2008 standard.

[alan]

Yes. That should be a good start.
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~