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I am the lead engineer for a startup, and because of that, I am in charge of managing the servers. When building/purchasing servers for the site, It would be good to know what the biggest bottleneck that hinders Apache/Lighttpd performance. I know that the network is the biggest one, but what about other server resources? Should I invest more money into getting larger/more powerful CPUs or more RAM? And why? Is there a resource ratio I should be looking for?

We are using PHP 5.3 for the frontend. Databases are irrelevant because they are on other servers.

Thanks

PS: Everything is run off of SSD, including the content being served up.

EDIT: The server is serving up dynamic pages, that can range from no database queries to 10-20 with complex caculations.

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Depends entirely on what the servers are serving. Small static content will be one thing; pages that take lots of SQL queries or computation to generate will be another. – Ollie Jun 16 '11 at 2:18
I suspect that, as written, this question is open-ended, possibly subjective, and/or impossible to answer. – goblinbox Jun 16 '11 at 3:08
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post a question on Serverfault, but ask about a specific problem you have (ie users reporting slow load, users reporting timeout). They might let you ask a general question like "What tools best measure how my website is performing?" As it's currently worded, this question is too open ended. – hyperslug Jun 16 '11 at 6:28
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closed as not a real question by Randolph West, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Patches, hyperslug, Sathya♦ Jun 16 '11 at 6:58

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