Upgrading web server - worth it?

I'm currently trying to determine if it is worth upgrading my web server to something faster. I've tried everything in the book to make my sites faster and the next step is updating the server itself.

I'm currently running a 2 year old dual Xeon 5450 Quad Core (3.0GHz Harpertown x 8) w/ 8gb of DDR2 ram, and two 15k 146gb seagate drives in RAID. Doing about 31gb of data a day the load hovers around 3-4 (although I know that isn't the same as if I had one processor).

Would it be worth moving to, say a dual Hex Core Xeon 5650 - 2.66GHz (Westmere) w/ 12gb ram and a similar configuration?

Upgrading server is surely always benefitial but did you try all possible optimization methods ?

I would first try Searchlight ( if you are still on vb 3.x ) then try nginx + php-fpm and possibly a MariaDB switch over MySQL ( i am planning to do last step very soon )

I'm running nginx as a proxy to apache at the moment. Unfortunately I need the whm/cpanel backend to stay in tact for now.

Originally Posted by tavenger5

a 2 year old dual Xeon 5450 Quad Core (3.0GHz Harpertown x 8) w/ 8gb of DDR2 ram, and two 15k 146gb seagate drives in RAID. Doing about 31gb of data a day

I have a similar server..... and put 2 gb of data through it a day. I'd most definitely say you need to upgrade.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

I have a similar server..... and put 2 gb of data through it a day. I'd most definitely say you need to upgrade.

What should I concentrate more on though? CPU? RAID? RAM?

Yes


I run raid 10.

upgrading to ddr3 at a fast mhz should be your number one concern, along with a fast cpu set up.

hrm, in my webserver I have 8gb of DDR2 - in the Database server there are 12gb of DDR3. I'm not sure that DDR3 can be swapped out on the webserver.

I'm currently running RAID 1 on both. I would love to switch over to RAID 10 but that would add at least another $200 a month for each server.