Price performance

I plan on purchasing a new production server that will be running sql server and IIS under the dotnet framework/Windows Server 2003. It will be doing the following-

Running 6 or 7 customer service web applications that will operate as asp.net apps w/vb.net. These are database intensive applications but run a relatively light load with only 20 or so users accessing.

Running the 'customer service' portion of our web site that customers will use to access their account info, historical orders, order status, etc. These are also asp.net pages and are modestly database intesive. If I had to make a WAG, I would say that maybe 50 users on average to say 100 peak using these pages.

I plan on buying a single Xeon with say 2 GB of RAM, I'm not sure about the hard drives but something with suds.

So my question after that long tome is what's the tradeoff between RAM and extra processor. Given a fixed budget for the server, if I were to ask for additional funds I'm not sure if I should invest in additional processor or more RAM.

And also, I'm not sure about running the server for both internal and external applications. Obviously the internal apps could take a hit if things got busy externally. Is there any kind of best practice that advises against this.

Any ideas?aleviating contention is the driving force behind most server tuning processes. two disks better than one, two memory sticks instead of one, and multiple processors instead of one.

i've always thought that if all basic requirements have been met on the server and i have some money left over, that more processors are better money spent than memory.|||aleviating contention is the driving force behind most server tuning processes. two disks better than one, two memory sticks instead of one, and multiple processors instead of one.

i've always thought that if all basic requirements have been met on the server and i have some money left over, that more processors are better money spent than memory.Wow, I almost never see database servers that are "processor bound", mine are always constrained by either RAM or bandwidth (either backplane or network). Even when the application server resides on the same box as the database server, I rarely see the machine starving for CPU before it runs out of RAM!

I always find it interesting to hear other points of view, but that one really surprises me.

-PatP