how many simultaneous users?
I'm trying to (roughly) work out how many simultaneous users a dedicated server can handle
I realise this is very hard to do without taking lots of things into account.
I was reading about python's Twisted server (here ) and it boasts "The server can take loads of up to 3000 users at a time and still keep churning several million requests a day, even on low end hardware."
I got to thinking ... what does "3000 users at a time" mean? Do they mean 3000 users logged in to a website and requesting content every 30 seconds (say)... or 3000 page requests at a time? (unlikely?!)
Also... what does "low end hardware" mean? No idea.
So then I got to thinking about my current project to implement a community forum, similar to this one, which would probably need to handle around 500 logged in and actively browsing users... (yes I'm sure of those figures)...
If the content/requests were 90% static and the remaining 10% was Apache/PHP/MySQL.. with some caching of the dynamic content where possible... then I wonder what sort of hardware would be required?
"3000 users at a time" seems like alot if your content is dynamic and not cached properly. I'm not sure if Apache/PHP/MySQL could handle this on "low end hardware" as Twisted claims it can.
Also, I guess it also depends on how requests are handled under stress... do the requests get rejected? queued? or crash the server? Im not sure about how Apache handles simulataneous requests, so I have reading to do I guess.
Anway
I guess what I'd really appreciate is some real-world examples of existing servers and what load they are handling and how they are handling it
