Some beginner questions

[Peter Van Dijck]

Hi, some beginners' questions.

(I promise I'll write up what I learn for beginners on my blog so it
can help others too.)

1) Memory usage. The examples say configure it with 2Gigs.  Is all the
data send to memcache stored in ram memory? If my webserver only has
1G ram, is it ok to allocate 500M to memcache?

2) Where to run it?
My webserver now has my db and my website (php, mysql) running on it.
The site is rather db intensive. Should I first put the db on a
separate server, and wait with memcache, or should I use my first
separate server for memcache, keep the db on the main webserver?

3) What server to get?
I have 1 dedicated server now, probably slowly growing to a few more
over the next 6 months. Should I plan for dedicated memcache servers?
And if so, should I focus on paying for lots of memory? Or rather pay
for lots of processor speed? Or lots of storage? It seems like if I
take a dedicated memcache server, I should pay for lotsa memory and
keep processor and storage cheap, is that more or less right? Any
rules of thumb?

Thanks for bearing with me on these beginner questions,

Cheers,
Peter Van Dijck