Re: Web Server Requirements

It's really dependent on what the users will be doing.  If they are just
going to be browsing simple pages with very little code-behind and all
data-processing offloaded on other servers, then 50 users wouldn't
really put much of a load on the system.  So a fairly basic server setup
would probably get you by very easily.

All this would absolutely need would be a single-processor machine with
2GB of RAM most likely.  However I wouldn't buy any server without
dual-processors and 2-4 GB of RAM.  Definitely overkill, but for the
(relatively) minimal price difference it could be used for other things
as well and have lots of room to grow.

If your web-app requires some serious horsepower (say your users are all
hitting AJAX content with multiple updates every few seconds, and a lot
of business logic or other processing takes place in your code behind or
otherwise on the same server), then honestly, the sky is the limit.

In web-farms that I'm familiar with where the servers do a medium-load,
to handle several million hits per day is 4 servers, dual-processor with
2-4 GB each.  Though they are underutilized.

You may want to consider load-balancing (Network Load Balancing comes
standard with Windows Server Standard 2003 now I believe).  Then if your
load grows you can drop in one or more new web servers.  Of course, this
means you have to worry about distributed session state, but that's a
minor issue if your app is growing that fast.

Hope this helps.

Jeremy

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