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Intel Celeron Processor J1900
theblackesthat
Member
in General
https://ark.intel.com/products/78867/Intel-Celeron-Processor-J1900-2M-Cache-up-to-2_42-GHz
Do you think this CPU along with 4GB-8GB of ram and an SSD drive would be enough to host a fairly large https://www.simplemachines.org forum? Forum has like 15,000-20,000 members with a couple hundred being active at any one time. This will be only thing hosted on this box. I can pay 40-50$ a month more and step up to a real Xeon CPU, but obviously I'm trying to save money. How shitty are Celeron's now days?
Comments
Hundreds of connections a second to the database server on a Celeron? I have my doubts, but you're free to try it out. It's the only way you'll get a definitive answer on what exactly you can run.
Yea, I'm skeptical too. Maybe I should just fork up some more money and get a real E3-1230 or something. Thanks for your input.
With passmark score of 1900-ish for 4 cores, I'd say no to a forum with hundreds of people online at the same time.
If it's lower end of hundreds though, I think it's going to be okay.
Then just get two Kimsufi i5 or i7s. Or if you don't have a huge amount of data, a couple of these with SSD: https://www.kimsufi.com/en/order/kimsufi.xml?reference=1801sk20
Can separate Web and DB and not bother with some Celeron.
The CPU is a bit better then a Core 2 Duo.
If you want to run something big, get something bigger.
I would say 100-150 online is normal. 300 would be max. However room for growth would be nice too.
Core 2 Duo are ancient. I think I better just suck it up and go with an E3.
Thanks everyone for their input.
You won't have any growth room with J1900.
Forum usage differs in CPU load greatly depending on what users do. Simple posting doesn't take lots of resources. But, if/when more than few users begin forum search, that's when J1900 will choke.
You won't go wrong with E3.
That's probably a tight one. No ECC, just 2 MB cache, No AES-NI, PCIe 2.
I think that for a typical linux-mysql-PHP-nginx stack It'll work but intolerably slow and even with just 100 users it won't be fun.
This is the weird thing. Let me explain why:
I have experience in hosting pretty big communities with 500-700-1000 users at the same time on just 8GB ram and 2 dedi cores. It was work super fine and good and consume around 2GB of RAM and around 1 core (but the forum software is xenforo without tons of plugins, and with caching).
The server was:
cache enabled on xenforo side via standard default instruments.
Not far ago, I had experience with the forum software (forgot name, but consume around the same resources like SMF and xenforo) with around 480 online at the same time.
Results: nginx + PHP-fpm able to cover such amount of users easy, because of the nature and idea of the forums. What about chats, it will not handle. But just simple forum, will be super fine. Plus very important to restrict or replace default search with google addon, and also ideally add microcache or fastcgi_cache (but it's pretty hard to do if your app does not have such feature to distinguish users logged in from users which not authorized)
Just do like people said above, try it first.
Except there's literally not a single reason to even try. No matter how much you'd pay for the J1900, it's very unlikely to be less than those Kimsufi i7s. And there's no chance in hell that the Celeron will beat an i7. Sure, you may be able to "get by" on a Celeron, it could be "enough", at least for now, and not too terrible. But why? Why go with a worse performance CPU, I assume for about the same price, leaving no room for expansion or traffic spikes, etc. Not to mention if the budget is up to $50 or more, you can get a proper CPU for that, not a 10W mini-PC and laptop part.
I'd consider the J1900 if it was 5 EUR or less, but I have a feeling the OP is looking at a 20 USD or so pricetag (don't remember any host offering those, so it must be some smaller one, and those typically nowhere near as cheap as "the big 3").
Well i know a vb3 forum with with 500-1000 active users at peak, running on a Xeon 3065 (2 cores, 1504 passmark) with 4GB RAM and Raid 0 HDD's.. and it is silky smooth 24/7.
edit: I guess the cache could make a healthy difference, 4M between 2 cores on the xeon and 2M between 4 cores on the celery. Single core speed perhaps too, but I doubt too much for a forum.
Forum is SMF 2.0.15 with a handful of addons. I know this still doesn't let you fully know what resources are required. I am planning to use serverpilot or runcloud or something like that to avoid cpanel being a resource hog. I'm just gonna stop being a cheapskate and get a better CPU for it. I don't want to have to upgrade again in 6-12 months or anything. So I better just get a good one right off the bat. Thanks everyone.
I got an i3 for one of my forum, and it runs pretty fine with that amount of online. Of course i3 is much faster than a j1900. i3-530 in my case.
I've run a similar sized MyBB forum fine on a VPS with 512MB RAM and one vCore. Of course, a lot of this depends on all sorts of factors like how good you are at tuning, software configuration, exact visitor behaviour etc.
I've generally found that for a well optimized/tuned setup on low end hardware, CPU is often not the issue (as long as your DB queries aren't insane) - I/O is. But forums' DB is often not that big, so 4-8GB RAM should cache it fine.
Probably a better point to start from: what are you currently running on? PHP requests per second + average number of queries per page are also probably better metrics than "online users".
Why, oh why would you even want to run a DB on a consumer grade HW ?
this is J1900 https://chipcore.com
but this not good
Atom N2800 from kimsufi works the same way
Jeez this clouvider dude takes a dump in every thread. Just observe the current cpu usage and then estimate whether it'll run well based on cpubenchmark scores. 500 active users seems like nothing. That's far less than 500 requests per second.
The same reason you sell consumer hardware - it works for some peoples situations. This is why Kimsufi is popular too.
Clearly not recommending to run DB on them? Are you?
HINT: ECC (or lack of thereof)
I know, reality check hurts, right?
Call it dump if you like, your preference, not mine ;-).
Even if it lacks ECC that doesn't mean it isn't suitable for running a database.
500 Active user forum would still be considered a smaller end forum and there are forums with thousands upon thousands active all the time. The man has a budget and asked if this hardware would work or not and didn't at any point ask for you to stroll in and be an absolute asshat.
You're going to alienate potential customers if you keep up this attitude.
No one is an asshat, well, you are by trying to paint me as hostile, when I’m clearly not.
Soho grade hardware is very much unsuitable to run any server workload, it was not designed for this purpose.
In or close to OP’s budget you can get a low end, older gen E3 with ECC on the other side of the pond that was actually build to handle the task.
He asked if this hardware was up to the task. You could have simply said, "I would not recommend this due to lack of ECC memory even if the CPU can cope."
You stroll up in every thread and make some rude remark. Look at your previous behavior in threads and you should realize that.
For example - You attack Zare repeatedly when they have done nothing to you. I have history with Zare (It wasn't good history at all) and I can see you being an ass.
Just think before you reply... You're representing your brand here after all.
EDIT:
Back on topic a bit. The CPU might be a bit weak for this task at times.
Why are some here attacking @Clouvider? What he said was probably a bit too much on the professional and "reliability is everything" side but it was neither plain wrong nor aggressive.
I myself brought up the lacking ECC up too although I put a bit less weight to it than Clouvider.
Let's be realistic. That processor is made for a certain kind of use case which can be described as low power, low processor performance (compared to a Xeon) and reliable 24/7 operation with low load. Keep in mind though that reliability means quite different things in the Home or SoHo world and in the DC world.
A typical use case I'd see is a all-in-one in a home office or a firewall or asterisk box in a small to medium business office.
Of course one can use it for a web/PHP server with possibly hundreds of users too but that's certainly not what that processor was designed and meant for. Just 2 cache levels for example will be noticed painfully.
Btw, in OPs place I wouldn't go for i3 or i-whatever but would rather go for an old Xeon. They've become quite cheap. If OP is looking for something using less power a Xeon-D might serve well but unfortunately they seem to be a bit rare with providers.
The server hardware discussion is mostly bullshit. ECC is good for security, but HDD doesn't matter (just plug in a new one if it breaks) and CPUs are nearly identical. E.g. I have a Xeon E3 1230v3 in my Desktop PC and it's actually an i7-4770 without onboard graphics that can't be overclocked with a few more instruction set extensions, if at all.
The reason people tell off clouvider is because he has been behaving like a grumpy old man for years. This dude needs to learn to leave others alone. We get it. He sells the best servers and you must pay $50 a month to host a forum.
You have no clue what you’re talking about, frankly. It’s supposed to be a technical forum, so far I can see such a load of misinformation that it becomes painful to read.