How powerful a server do I need to handle about 5,000 queries per
second on Oracle 10? We will be usuing Solaris 10

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Clarification of Question by gomvents-ga on 01 Jan 2005 12:33 PST

Don't be a wise-guy! It is a search engine script we will be running,
custom made. It's uses PHP and Oracle.

Without knowing the complexities of the transaction mix all one can
say is that you need five Commodore 64s in a Tetrahedron.

grthumongous-ga is wise all right, he's on target and I would second
the 'five Commodore 64s in a Tetrahedron' answer unless you can supply
more info.

I'll take it one further and add my official answer to this question:
"It Depends."

Seriously, you can't really expect anyone to be able to answer this
question with no indication of the complexity of the queries and
breadth of the data being searched. What kind of SQL is the php script
throwing at the DB? Are they queries doing text subsearch queries?

I can support 5k queries a second on my $1k desktop here if the query
isn't very heavy duty and tuned appropriately. The boxes I support in
a production environment support about 3000 medium complexity queries
a second and about 300 update transactions a second but they have 4-8
processors and much faster disk I/O.

I would say your best bet is to talk to a DBA in your company or hire
outside consultants to help you with this decision. Betting tens of
thousands of dollars of hardware purchasing on a $2 google answer is a
sure fire way to get a project off on the wrong foot.

Thank you but the idea was to get a Google report to have better
questions for hte DBA and to ake sure we aren't taken for a ride...
currently we are looking into Oracle RAC.

The queries are keyword lookups from a table... I'm not the coder so I
don't know 100% how it works.