Determining system capability

[Guest Stumbles]

Not sure if this is the right place for the question but here goes.

 

How does one determine what a system will handle. A reasonable ballpark figure is what I'm after here. I know that is a very broad question so let me use the following setup. Now bear in mind I would like to know "how to figure it out". By that I mean analogies to such and such a system with xx amount of ram, etc, etc. Does not tell me how. However, worst case I'll have to run with that.

 

Anyway, lets say I got an IBM PC Server with dual 333 Pentium II's, 512MB ram, 6 IBM 9 GB 10K rpm scsi drives (for now just using the built in Adaptec 2940) (I'll deal with raid at some other time)..

 

Suppose I set this up strickly as a web server with ftp downloading. Also assume the fattest pipe known is in use. How many users could this system support?

 

Ok a different setup. Suppose the same system is now setup up as a file server supporting quotas, nfs, samba.

 

Any assistance with this is greatly appreciated. TIA

[Glitz]

What do you define as a successfully supported user? I would think that as you add users the system simply becomes less responsive. So what kind of minimum response time are you looking for?

 

I would also suspect that it depends on how much data your web server has to serve on average to each user.

 

Glitz.

[Guest Stumbles]

What do you define as a successfully supported user?  I would think that as you add users the system simply becomes less responsive.  So what kind of minimum response time are you looking for?

 

I would also suspect that it depends on how much data your web server has to serve on average to each user.

 

Glitz.

 

Yes I understand the more users that connect to a system and the amount of data server the slower said system will become.

 

I was just wondering if there was some kind of "rule of thumb" that existed a person could use.

 

I have heard people say, "you know system "A" with "B" amount of ram can support "C" number of users before you see a performance drop". I was just wondering what sort of "formula" was being used to arrive at such conclusions. I guess I would have to defer to the OEM of whatever system and see if they had done any performance benchmarks.