[eva2000]

Originally Posted by Lord Chaos

Ok, if you have a fairly large forum with a user peak of 1000+ users. 1+ million posts, 300-500+ forums, 100+ usergroups, 10-20 styles and so on, what...

1. Hardware would be optimal?

2. Which Hardware is highest priority to have as fast and as much of as possible? (ie. RAM, Harddrive speed, etc.)

3. What hardware would ensure this forum would be able to expand even beyond this without any problems?

Please answer these questions with complete disregard to cost, it is irrelevant wether the suggestions costs 100 dollars, 10K dollars or 100K dollars, all that matters are that they are correct.

regardless of cost, such a forum size would need more than 1 dedicated server to run you're looking at 1 web server and 1 mysql database server

if cost is no issue a 2 server setup would be:
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web server

Dual 3.0GHZ Xeon 533FSB 512K L2 cache
4GB PC2100 REG ECC DDRAM
4x 74GB SCSI 15,000RPM HDD in raid 1+0 using an SCSI RAID Controller with onboard cache ram 64-128MB cache
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database server

Dual 3.0GHZ Xeon 533FSB 1MB L2 cache
4 - 8GB PC2100 REG ECC DDRAM
4x 74GB SCSI 15,000RPM HDD in raid 1+0 using an SCSI RAID Controller with onboard cache ram 64-128MB cache
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1. connected together privately with Gigabit network card supporting Jumbo frames
2. probably running RH Enterprise Linux variety
3. in order of priority it's , fast and lots of ram especially if 1 server does web and mysql, fast scsi hdds, cpu power