How many NIC for a event photography viewing system, advantages ofQuad Port (4-port) NICs

I am going to be running the Photo Parata Event Photography software
(http://www.miltonstreet.com) at a large event. The software simply
hosts images on the Windows server and used the Apache server. The
images are 3K ~ 4K for the thumbnails and around 20K for the larger
images.

The server has 4 Gigs of ram, 15K RPM hard drives, and Quad Core Intel
Xeon processor, thus I am thinking my bottle neck is going to be the
network port.

How many viewing stations should be connected to one port of the
server?

Also, is there an advantage in the Dual or Quad port NIC's over simply
putting multiple single port NIC's in the server?

Sam

Sam,

I don't know how big a "large" event is, but I suspect you will be able to
serve a sufficient number of clients. I don't know the Parata sofware, but
if it is being served as web pages with 20K image you should be able to
serve hundreds of clients depending on how furiously the users click through
the images. Unfortunately your post doesn't have enough information for
me to be more specific. If, for example, you have 1 million different 20k
images being served, then disk and memory cache will come into play because
the images will be rotated frequently. If, however, there are 2,000 20k
images most will likely end up being served directly out of ram.
Firther, its not clear if you have 100Mbs NIC or 1000Mbs nic. A gigabit
NIC and Switch connecting to your client machines will give you more
headroom than 100 Mbs NIC (maybe 5x in practical terms).

Simply adding multiple NIC's to a machine most likely will not increase your
bandwidth for serving images. To get more bandwidth you will need to get
NIC's that support "teaming." Teaming allows the type of bandwidth
expansion you are thinking of, but typically makes the NIC's more expensive.
You could also get a similar effect by using regular NIC's and multihoming
your machine and splitting your users into different subnets / LANs /
segments.

The best way to find out if your machine will support the client load is ti
test it. There are a variety of different products out there from really
pricey to free. A simple google search will get you there.

Hope that helps,
-eric


"sam" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:cfa803e8-d3b0-481d-8d15-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I am going to be running the Photo Parata Event Photography software
> (http://www.miltonstreet.com) at a large event. The software simply
> hosts images on the Windows server and used the Apache server. The
> images are 3K ~ 4K for the thumbnails and around 20K for the larger
> images.
>
> The server has 4 Gigs of ram, 15K RPM hard drives, and Quad Core Intel
> Xeon processor, thus I am thinking my bottle neck is going to be the
> network port.
>
> How many viewing stations should be connected to one port of the
> server?
>
> Also, is there an advantage in the Dual or Quad port NIC's over simply
> putting multiple single port NIC's in the server?
>
> Sam