[K12OSN] server sizing... again

[William Fragakis]

I know this subject has been done to death (and I've read the wiki). Our
experience has been on the smaller side of things- our biggest server is
a dual core P4 4 gb ram with a software RAID 1 with 2 10k SATA drives.
We have about 40 clients on it.

But, we are being asked as a "Skunkworks" project (hush-hush for the
moment) to come up with some true enterprise server configs. Assuming we
offload the /opt/lts and /home directories elsewhere, how many clients
can we load onto something like a dual core opteron (say, 280 with 4 gb
RAM)?

The server will be in a K-5 environment and used to do a lot of graphics
intensive applications such as Flash-based web sites, TuxMath, etc. The
users won't be concurrent. But the performance has to be "snappy". If
this goes well, big things may come afterwards. So, we want to get it
right the first time.

Can we go 60 or 80 clients without problems? 

Would going to two dual core CPUS help significantly? (Adds about $1000
to the cost)

Regards,
William Fragakis
morrisbrandon.com