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Is it hard for a server with 500 Ram, to host 30 000 websites + 30000 databases, with 3 users on each a day?

Thats for Windows Server 2008, IIS7

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That better be 500GB of RAM... –  meagar Feb 4 '10 at 21:52
Those 3 users are going to be busy ;) –  John Gardeniers Feb 4 '10 at 23:53
I meant 3 requests, so maybe not so busy –  dynback.com Feb 5 '10 at 10:08
I like the fact that almost everyone says no, but you accept an answer that suits your needs rather than one that provides proof and metrics. Perhaps this roles in this question should be gven to your server with 60Gb of ram on a 32 bit OS... –  Mark Henderson Mar 11 '10 at 20:17
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5 Answers

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Well, if you seriously limit the amount of RAM given to each database, as well as to each website, then sure, you can do it.
You do need to test it and examine the performance hit you're going to get.

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500MB RAM will not be enough. You'll need a couple orders of magnitude more than that.

The exact specs you'll need depend on the workload. How many daily hits are you expecting? Are these static pages or web apps? What is considered acceptable performance? What sort of IOPS does this require? How large are the databases?

What are you really asking? And why? Are you thinking of migrating from managed servers to your own infrastructure? Are they currently running on a couple dozen servers and you're looking to save money?

The simple answer is: don't do it. Even if it works, it won't work well.

You commented that this was for a dev test machine. What will they be testing? How important is this testing? Until you provide some more detailed answers, you're only going to get more questions.

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Its theorethical question. I am thinking is it make sense, to create hosting for developers. With many things, but no real activity. So the real question: "How much CPU and RAM needed for very very rare used web apps" –  dynback.com Feb 4 '10 at 21:30
I'm not sure why you'd want to set up such an extreme "dev box" as it wouldn't be capable of supporting all that much actual development. –  Sean Howat Feb 4 '10 at 21:45
The answer is still "It depends" - on all the factors I listed above. –  sh-beta Feb 5 '10 at 18:47
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Yes. It's hard for a server to do that. Without more details, that's the best answer you can get. A more nuanced answer would be "it depends", but I'm going to say that in general, the answer is Yes.

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Why hard? Because of AppPools? –  dynback.com Feb 4 '10 at 21:42
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That gets you 6kb of RAM per database, assuming that you give 200Mb for the DB and 200Mb for web server, and 100Mb for the underlying OS.

Short answer: No.

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Maybe loaded once in a day and than cleared from memory. –  dynback.com Feb 9 '10 at 13:32
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For theoretical limits on large numbers of servers see: http://serverfault.com/questions/46734/iis7-theoretical-limits

Otherwise, 500Gb might be more realistic.

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