ramdisk/nic/ ultra fun server question

ok so i was thinking about putting together a relatively cheap server

i was thinking like

2x2500+ 3 or 4 gigs of cheap ram , and some cheap hard-drive
and gigabit NICs


now if i were to make 2 or 3 gigs of that ram into a ramdisk

then make that partition shared over the net -- via smb


now what kind of throughput//access times would i be looking at?

also what would be a bottleneck for access throughput? (the NIC, ram speed?)


thanks

You might have more luck in the hardware forums than in the alt os forum with that.

you would hit a bandwidth bottleneck LONG before you reach a RAM bottleneck. even DDR 266 runs at like...*checks google*...2.1GB/sec which would require 2x1Gb nics to saturate.

(MRD you bring up a good point, and i might post there later, but it just seemed to me that people that browse this section might have more understanding of what im trying to go after)
ahh thanks, that was what i was wondering...

would it be possible to 'bind' several gigabit NICs together, something along the lines of QoS packet load balancing?

also would the pci bus bandwidth be enough to support 3x gigabit NICs, going full out-- or would i need some expensive server/workstation motherboard with PciX or 64 bit pci

the PCI bus supports 133MB/sec throughput and 1x1Gb nic would use 125 of that. If you're looking for more bandwidth than that you're gonna need 64bit/PCIx