Don Baccus probably knows what he is talking about. However, I have
never trusted SMP on Intel boxes; I don't think Intel has them quite
figured out yet.
For hardware, you might just want to buy a motherboard that supports
1GB RAM or more, and then cache everything you can, counting on that
to get you through any rough spots. I saw a cheapo $99 motherboard
that supports up to 2GB at my local PC place just today, so they are
out there. A lot of motherboards only support up to 768MB (3x256MB
DIMMs).
Remember that even if Postgres itself doesn't / can't use all the RAM,
the filesystem caching will still be in effect for reading.
I would think that you should be able to serve a decent amount with
your current machine. Even if you are saturating a T1 completely, you
are using less than 20MB per minute of disk bandwidth between logging
and reading (10MB internal usage and 10MB reading/logging/db
searching).
If you are serving a "highly graphical" interface, that is a lot of
images, right? Again, RAM might be the best answer - no need to hit
the disks.
The question of Karl's templating vs manual rewrites makes me ask the
question of how many pages you need? What I mean is that you seem to
want bboard, ecommerce, homepages as the main modules that need to be
heavily modified for your interface.
