Hi,

I plan on running 3-5 Drupal 7 sites, and was wondering if the 512 would be alright form cpu usage wise. The goal is to setup nginx to run the web side of things, on an ubuntu server and APC.

2 of the sites will be static with very low usage.

the other 2 sites would be supporting 20 users concurrently browsing a small number of nodes (less than 200) for about 1 hour a day, with sporadic usage during other times, and file uploads occasionally)

The 2 higher use sites will be running several modules, but they will be in a multi-site configuration with the other sites, which should limit resource use too.

Would I be limited in any way by the 512's cpu/ram

This is my first time to use self-setup hosting, and I've been running a 2gb storm server for my department at the university I am a student at, where we run around 100 or so sites like the two described on Drupal 6 with apache with little problem (the use is not concurrent all the time, probably only 3-10 sites used heavily with 20 users at once).

I just wanted to make sure I'm not going to get yelled at by support over this setup.

Vidus

It sounds like you should be fine. I've run multiple forums with a combined 550,000 hits per day on a 768 Linode with no problems. I don't have much experience with Drupal but as long as it's not having to do intense code or SQL queries then it should be doable.

Alright, thanks. There are some pretty intense views that can do sql queries, but I'm planning on limiting their default scope (so instead of displaying all content, it would only be say 1/3rd of it at once)

Also going to be aggressive in caching the queries.

A 512 should not even break a sweat at your peak load. If the worst happens you can always upgrade fairly painlessly.

Excellent! Thanks for that. Looking forward to getting things up and running. I've made turning this into a reality my summer project and a way to force me to learn the nuts and bolts behind Drupal. Good to hear it should turn out alright.

Unless you're Zunzun, it's extremely rare to be CPU limited on a linode. You normally run out of RAM first.

Or in my case get disk io bound

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I'll echo the above. I currently have four linodes, one of them a 512. On the 512 I have:
-Two Wordpress Sites
-Custom PHP based site
-Custom other site
-Postfix + Cyrus + Spamassassin + Postgrey
-MySQL
-five screen sessions (3 to other linodes, 2 for local services)
-IceCast 2

..and no problems. Performance is quite good, granted I did do some careful tuning of all services to ensure it. I have a Linode 1536 that gets around a million pageviews/day with nary a hiccup, all are dynamic (PHP) pages, several wordpress and several Joomla sites. Granted the databases are running on another Linode 1024 dedicated just to MySQL, but that's a different scale.

Said Linode 512 actually replaced a HP DL380G5 with a 15k SAS RAID-10 and dual dual core Xeons with 6GB of RAM sitting on a DS3. I'm seeing performance on par with the HP, granted I have to do a lot more active memory management, but I've not noticed a downside.