Dear Reader,

I'm planning to setup a home based web server + BBS using Ubuntu or Debian distro on my old computer with below spec:

- Intel Celeron 2.1 Ghz
- Intel 845m Chipset (on-board display card)
- 40 GB harddisk
- 512 MB RAM
- Realtek NIC
- ADSL 1.5M

I always do read those linux thread by saying that the old system is good enought to run a web base server using Linux.

But, I'm curious if there is any linux software or web base system which I can use to find out the this system's "capability" such as: "when currently there are 300 people viewing the thread in my home based webserver BBS, the system or network broadband is already reaching it's top performanace or bottleneck??

Or there are some way else i can study my system capabilities??

I think the answer to the question asked is "obviously not". The capability of your hardware as a web server depends so heavily on the way that you choose to code the website that I don't see how this is possible without making quite unjustified assumptions about how much work the system has to do for each visitor. And, even then, something else like your link to the internet (or your isp's throttling policy, which is the same thing in a way) could be the bottleneck.

So if, for example, your machine just serves up a selection of a few plain web pages that are simply requested by url, that is probably quite easy and your hardware can cope with a reasonable number of visitors, and that possibly increases with a reverse proxy in httpd accelerator mode. If every query is actually a database look up and pages are composed on the fly, then that number may well decrease by an order of magnitude. If the database code/structure is bad (inappropriate) then that number may well diminish significantly as well.

More usefully, you can build a prototype system and observe the scaling as certain numbers of users (real or simulated) access the system. This requires a certain amount of intelligence in understanding users, what they are likely to do on your site and understanding the limitations of your hardware, but it is at least in priciple 'do-able'.

Not quite sure how this relates to 'justifying' the hardware, unless you mean that you want to justify the purchase of more capable hardware.

I ran the website for my county library on a box with roughly those specs (it was a stock dell dimension 1100). The server ran for 2 years on Debian sarge, never had a problem. The site was basically html, with some downloadable pdf files and lots of pictures, so it wasn't much of a chore as far as doing a lot of php or database work. But it also ran DNS off and on, and we aren't a small county, so I'd say those specs will get you a good long way.

Like the previous poster said, I don't think you'll be able to get hard numbers.