nginx - more cores or better cpu?

Question

I currently have two systems with nginx in the following CPUS/RAM..

• 1x Intel® C2750 (Avoton), 8 cores 8 threads, @2.4 GHz, 8Gb RAM, 1 TB SATA3
• 1x Intel® Xeon® E3 1220, 4 cores 4 threads @3.1 GHz, 16Gb RAM, 420 GB 10K RAID 1

Basically I need it to host 6 Wordpress (with a cache plugin) and server a few thousands of files per day. I'm using free CloudFlare service...

My question is...

Witch server is better for my needs? Less CPU performance but more cores, or More CPU performance but less cores?

Best regards,

Answer 1

Well i think for your needs both of them will supply the same performance and this is because of some basic reason's:

1. you serve a thousands of users per day lets say 10k this is not a massive traffic for your server unless they come in the same second see(DDoS) and for that situation non of them will help you.
2. CPU in most case's is not the bottleneck of the system setup you didn't mention here the HD those server's have, for example, if they have just regular HardDisk not an SSD both of them will give more or less the same performance.
3. bottom line, i would choose the cheapest one of those 2 unless money is not an issue.

hope it made your question clear enough.

Answer 2

I think you need choice:

1x Intel® Xeon® E3 1220, 4 cores 4 threads @3.1 GHz, 16Gb RAM, 420 GB 10K RAID 1

• 16Gb RAM, it is very important for you wordpress cache, because more data can be kept in the cache RAM
• a more fast HDD, biggest speed, hight performance for cache
• you will not see difference cpu on Wordpress

Answer 3

I'm going to go with the second option:

1x Intel® Xeon® E3 1220, 4 cores 4 threads @3.1 GHz, 16Gb RAM, 420 GB 10K RAID 1

Why?

Faster Hard Drives lead to better website performance, RAID 1 can help deliver this. Also RAID 1 will prevent against Hard Drive failure in case one drive fails.

RAM is essential in hosting environments, you will notice the biggest improvement here if your server comes under load. As your WordPress site will not do a lot of data processing, extra CPU isn't essential; if your server can't keep up CPU processes are just backlogged; though if you reach 75% CPU load, you need to start thinking about upgrading that too.

The Cloud Computing Rant

Of course I will say that old fashioned dedicated servers are the way of the past, CloudFlare in front of dedicated CloudFlare webserver and a dedicated MySQL server would be the best combo (with potentially a load balancer in front of your Nginx server if you ever want to scale them up). Digital Ocean or AWS offer some great cloud computing technology (using more reliable SSDs). Or, even better, use a WordPress PAAS service like WPEngine behind CloudFlare!

The software

I'm glad you're using Nginx over Apache, that will help this out a bit, but make sure your WordPress site is optimised, you could even consider using HHVM in order to speed up the WordPress site further in case you're expecting a lot of load. In short, keep the amount of plugins you use down (for security if anything else). Prevent bruteforce attacks with Fail2Ban, potentially enable NAXSI on Nginx with the dedicated WordPress rules for extra security. Think about enable CSS/HTML/JS minification at a CloudFlare level with aggressive caching, providing it doesn't break your site. Oh, and also think about doing some OPCaching at a PHP level.