Hi folks...

I'm planning to deploy Gossamer Forums on a fairly large scale shortly. My estimate is about 100 million forum postings will be online within one year of launch. Best guess is 100,000 ***visitors*** per day to the site.

I'm considering a front end web server plus a backend MySQL server.

Questions:

1. dualcore or quadcore under CentOS? Does it really matter?
2. 32 bit or 64 bit version of CentOS? Everyone tells me bigger is better - MySQL, Apache, Postfix is main applications
3. disk space - for 100 million postings, what's the estimated amount of disk space for MySQL? What's the estimated disk space for the webserver portion? Attachments will be limited in size and minimal in the first place
4. SATA drives ok for this application? I use a lot of SAS drives in some other applications but trying to keep costs reasonable on this project
5. Internal search best for GForums? I know with Links, the internal search worked MUCH better when searching several million entires such as a DMOZ mirror..
6. RAM - 8 Gig enough on a MySQL database of this size? I'm thinking of 4 Gig on the webserver

Overkill, not enough? I'm open to ideas - if I could get away with it, I would do this all on one server but I think breaking it into two servers might be wiser from a performance perspective....

Thanks for any input - sorry for all the questions.. want to order the hardware shortly and hoping to start with the right requirements for year one at least...;)

Paul