I'm running a RoR web application on a dual core AMD Athlon 4450e server w/ 8GB RAM and Ubuntu.
It's doing alright, getting spikes up to 320 dynamic requests per minute, it's also handling all the assets, including serving up some larger video files.
I've got Apache w/ Passenger and MySQL running on the host.
Performance is still pretty consistent but I am seeing the load average starting to creep above 1 during higher load periods and CPU load getting up towards the 40 or 50% mark.
I can afford an additional computer and a quad core system w/ 8GB RAM fits my budget.
Should I turn the current box into the database server and put the quad core in front of it as a web server?
Would I be better off having the quad core run as both a database server and and a web server and keeping the existing dual core running beside it as another web server?
Any other server layouts that I should consider?
Here's a snapshot of the server under load:
server load http://img.skitch.com/20100208-jhk11btcb43yg4mhd75ecinqqr.png
Thanks,
-Tim