Ram Vs # Of Cores Server

We are looking to move our 2 Cscart 4.2 websites over to a new server soon. the larger of the 2 stores is relatively small with about 1,500 products and a few thousand hits per month.



We are trying to keep costs down, but still have good performance. So in selecting the server (either dedicated, VPS or Cloud, running CentOS), two key options are amount of RAM and # of processor cores.



Obviously more of both is better. If we have to choose between more RAM or more Cores, which has the bigger impact on performance with CSCart?



2 (or more) processor cores at 2GB RAM

vs

1 processor core at 4GB (or more) RAM



Thanks,

Malcolm

www.sycorp.ca

Ram because PHP only uses one processor.

I have 2 cscarts on 4x cpu and 2gb ram with acceptable speeds



You need both cpu and ram for cs-cart.



And if you set up a server now, I would be using php-fpm via fcgi. That can use as many processors you want

Naturally the more ram and the more processing power you can afford will always be best. But the question was cores v ram. Each page is served by one PHP process – that does one thing at a time, including just “waiting” while an SQL query is executed on the database server. Each PHP process will run on one core and so as far as I'm concerned more ram the better.



Thats when you are talking about 1 core or 2 cores. Your other processes like my mysql can use both but that's not worth much if they are waiting for PHP. If you have 2 cores and it does not mean php will use one and all other processes will use the other. Naturally with 4 cores the problem more or less goes away. If you had 8 cores they would all be used and you wouldn't need to rely on ram so the reverse has got to be true.

Thanks for the input. Since our site is is relatively small and light traffic, and budget constrained, I wanted to maximize what performance we got vs cost. Part of the reason for going to a VPS type is to allow relatively easy changes in configuration, so I will probably start with less RAM/Core and monitor the results, and if it's not acceptable, increase maybe the RAM first and see the results. IF that doesn't prove sufficient, then bumping the core up.



Thanks for the input.

Malcolm