building servers for web caching

[theboss]

I am assigned a task to custom built servers and deploy them for web caching. Since the hardware will be custom assembled to purpose, i was just wondering what kind of combo would best suit a web cache arrays

either a mid frequency CPU with a lot of DDR2-533 memory in high capacity and fast SCSI or SATA-II RAID arrays

or high frequency CPU with DDR2-667/800 in medium capacity with fast SCSI or SATA-II RAID arrays

in a nutshell.. shall i go for the fastest hardware and reduce the quantity or go for 1 step older hardware and increase the capacity.

 

[phaxmohdem]

I'm not familiar with "caching" servers so I'll just tell you what I know about regular web servers.

For dishing out static web pages, your primary bottle neck is disk and network IO not the processor or RAM necessarily

For database driven dynamic sites, disk drives and RAM are generally the bottlenecks.. (Faster CPU's are generally recommended for heavy DB usage as well)

Your post is very vague about specifics so its hard to recommend anything to you.

For your reference, my home web/email/file server runs on an Athlon XP 2500+ machine w/ 1GB RAM and 2 80 gig SATA HDD's in RAID 1. Runs beautifully however usage and workload would be considered light at best.

I don't know how big of cache you will be dealing with, or the ammount of data you'll be shoving around to xxx number of concurrent users.... so I'll just recommend this..

Single/Dual Core Opteron/Dual Opteron setup @ 2.0GHz per core or higher
2-4GB RAM (Normal DDR 400 RAM for now)
Fast-ass disk array
Fast Gigabit+ Network card (Is this for LAN or Internet operations? How much bandwidth do you have to play with for this server?)

Until Intel's woodcrest peeks out from behind the rocks, Opteron/Athlon64 rules the web servering world.

Should get the job done nicely. Post a bit more info about the data and usage patterns and I imagine these forum peoplez should be able to help you out more.

 

[theboss]

well lets says.. starting with 500 users..the solution may need to scale upto 2000 users