Requirements

Hardware Requirements

There are many possible configurations that could run this application. The scale of the enterprise obviously will have a significant bearing on the final configuration.

The operating system and the database engine chosen will have the largest bearing on System requirements. Each client connection to the web server and database engine will also consume RAM so the more connections the larger the RAM requirement. Similarly disk space required is a function of the volume of customers, suppliers and transactions. Suffice it to say that due to the efficiency of the components of the system the demands on the hardware are exceptionally light by client server application standards.

As a guide, an installation for up to 50 simultaneous users could consist of the following: a Linux operating system, an Apache web server, an entry level server with 512 MB RAM and a 10 Megabit network card. This would provide more than adequate performance. 100 Megabit network cards are now entry level. RAID SCSI swappable disks are preferred in any mission critical environment where disk access is intensive.

With multiple servers with with SMP, load balancing, a separate database server, and large amounts of RAM the limit on database size and the number can be scaled to the most demanding businesses.

Software Requirements

There are many sources of information on the compilation and installation of MySQL and PHP. See the following links:

http://logidac.com/apache/apache-install-rpm.phtml

http://www.linux-sottises.net/en_apache_install.php

The system could be used with many other database servers but it is tested and developed on MySQL. Independent benchmarks show that MySQL is one of the fastest for most common database tasks, particularly at establishing connections – since this is required for every page, MySQL is therefore ideally suited to the web environment. The ftp library for PHP is only required for sending order files to a Radio Beacon ftp server for remote warehouse services. Using Apache with mod_ssl and openssl secure sockets makes sense where there is any data transmitted over the Internet and not just over a LAN.