I'm on a virtual private server now which is a Quad Xeon 2.4 Ghz server with 512 MB standard RAM burstable to 2 GB for my account. I seem to be running into performance issues on this shared server, where server load runs up to 3 or 4 regularly (almost never occured on my previous server). <br /><br />Is a P4 3.0 Ghz dedicated box sufficient to run a threads 6.4 with a community of 7,000 users (only 30-40 active simultaneously at peak/ 15-20 regular)? Or should I look for a Dual Xeon server? (The P4 is only about $60 cheaper per month.) <br /><br />The thing is, I just moved to this new server and am disappointed by the performance. So I don't want to have to move again anytime soon after choosing a dedicated server. I run about 2 dozen other sites on the server. Half the traffic I generate comes from the forums, the other half from a large site that gets 1-1.5 million page views/month (50-60 GB traffic). The threads forum gets about the same on its own.<br /><br />Thanks for any assistance... for instance, what does this forum run on? (Yup, I've tuned mysql, and it's helped some... but I don't think it's helped enough...)

I'm no authority on this, but I think an additional 512MB of RAM will probably boost your performance more than anything else.

What's the URL to your boards, please? <br /> <br />Chances are that you need to be on a real dedicated machine instead of a VPS. VPSes are no better than standard shared hosting as far as resource sharing is concerned...

Well, don't know if this means much, but maybe it does portray how important memory is here:<br /><br />I have my own dedicated server and the large Threads board that I run uses up 4.36% CPU and 23.15% memory. And that's with 1GB RAM, which is double what you have.

A p4 dedicated box will be more than ample, as long as you actually have the whole server, and your not on a virtual dedicated.<br />My site is running on an AMD2800 with 1gb ram, and i've a community of about 9000 members, with 100-200 online at any one time. I also run other websites on that box, all without issue.