What servers are you using with vBulletin?

I would like to ask those of you with relatively large forums, let's say more than 500 concurrent users most of the time, or even more, for some info on what servers you are using.

My site is not that huge an attraction. The max # of users I've ever seen on-line is about 480 and that's not something that happens every day, mostly around 300 concurrent users. I need to figure out what sort of a server would be suitable to get, in order to move everything to my own machine, but I have no idea what size of a server I should be looking for.

Right now my php is running on a quad 500M xenon (4000 bogomips ttl), my db runs on another quad 1.4G xenon (9800 bogomips ttl).
php eats all 4 of cpus for seconds on end, sometimes minutes on end about ~30% of the day and probly 50% of the db cpus at peak times.

Now these numbers are given to me by the tech person of the company that hosts my site (for free), I have no reason to doubt them and I know he is not trying to pull my leg or anything. So what do you people think I should be looking for?

All your input would be sincerely appreciated.

[briansol]

i run a single server, dual chip, dual core opteron 270 (4x 2.0ghz) with 2gb of ram, and achieve ~.4 server loads most the time.

~400-500 concurrent during normal US day time.

[sv1cec]

Ah, thanks for your input.

I am thinking to get a Quad Xeon board, with one cpu at about 2-3 GHz with 2 GB of Ram, do you think that would be enough? If the need arises, I can always add another Quad Xeon.

[Amenadiel]

MY site has like 1000 concurrent users at some times, and it's running on a Xeon 3060 (dual Conroe-based CPU) with 4GB on RAM.

I've seen that a dual core CPU is more than enough for the time being, but I ran with 2GB of RAM and found out it was too little for peak moments.

My advise is: don't rush to a Quad CPU yet, look closely at your ram use, because once the server starts swapping it all breaks apart and you'll find yourself restarting the services to restore the site.

[dbembibre]

My site has 1000 concurrent users at time, i runing all with low loads in a very well optimized single server.
The server is a Dual Dual Xeon 2.8 with 4GB of RAM and 2 SCSI 17.000RPM SCSI discs

[sv1cec]

Well, if I am to buy a new motherboard, processors and RAM, I guess it won't hurt to buy the latest, right? And the Quad Xeons seem to be the latest, no? OK, 4GB of RAM is what I'll get, thanks.