Best use of funds for upgrade server components

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Best use of funds for upgrade server components

Asia_Expat

9:27 am on Oct 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have a very basic Dell R200 Poweredge. It's done the job very well but is now sweating and thrashing, especially during backups. I need to spend some money on it.

It only has 2 Gigs of memory. I'll surely be upgrading that.
It has a Pentium Dual-Core CPU E5400 @ 2.70GHz

It's got 2 HDDs... On one HDD is a fairly busy forum (100,000 + unique visits per month) and on the other is Piwik analytics.

It's running CentOS 5.8 with WHM/cPanel.

Could you please suggest some targetted upgrades that won't break the bank... we've got a baby due in March and finances are a bit tight at this time... Thanks.

J_RaD

11:33 am on Oct 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

well thrashing disks are hard to cure... you can throw ram at it but its still gota R/W to the disks. But 2 gigs is a wimpy amount of mem.... i'd start there, it will be the cheapest and quickest upgrade.

pick up another 2gb atleast and see where you are at.

if that stops the bleeding the next upgrade would be a new machine... you need to get on DDR3 and sata6 to get ahead of the curve.

Asia_Expat

7:37 pm on Oct 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

I've just realised I could pull the Core2 Quad Processor (Q8200) out of my desktop PC and swap it with the above mentioned processor... Is there any reason I can't do that? I don't need much power in my desktop and it seems they're interchangeable?

Doing that, plus adding another 6 Gigs of memory should extand the server's life by a couple of years, unless I see some major, major increase in traffic.

J_RaD

2:11 am on Oct 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

yes you are correct, as long as they are the same socket.

BUT........some boards suck and won't take a wide range of processors, so if you get a power on and nobody is home....... the board sucks and you'll have to download a spec sheet and upgrade based on that.

RAM is the only thing that is going to fend back your disk thrashing situation though.

you did say you have 2 disks so maybe moving the paging to the 2nd disk can help the main disk breath a little as well.