RAM vs Performance, how much is more than enough?

[Gregor Mosheh]

So, I was browsing through server hardware offerings
from various companies, and considering the need for
RAM. What I'm wondering is how much memory is really
helpful for a system that's serving up MapServer,
static HTML, and some PHP/MapScript stuff.

I've noticed that MapServer doesn't use much RAM. The
supporting webserver (Apache) isn't particularly
memory-consumptive either. The only real memory
gobbler of the setup seems to be the database, which
would run on a dedicated server.

I know the OS will use spare RAM for filesystem cache,
which is always good, but I'm curious as to whether
there's a noticable difference between serving up just
MapServer with 256 MB of RAM versus 2 GB.



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