4.1 Processing power

How fast and powerful processor do you need? It all depends on the peak load of the server. Never evaluate processor requirements based on average load!

Certain types of server components require more processing time. For example, handling SSL (secure socket layer) requires more processing (for encryption and deciphering). The same is also true for SQL database engines. File serving, on the other hand, requires relatively little processing power.

One way to determine processing power requirements is to use a benchmark system to evaluate the necessary processing power for various activities. For example, you can use a 1GHz P3 system as a benchmark system. Then, generate requests to the benchmark system until it is considered too slow. Let's assume that 50 CGI script hits per second is the maximum acceptable load to the benchmark system. If you need to handle up to 1000 CGI script hits per second, then the production system needs to have a processor or processors that produce at least 20 times the processing power of a single 1GHz P3.