6.0-BETA2 as reliable webserver?

[Frans-Jan v. Steenbeek]

Hi all,

I'm a sysadmin and a web-programmer at a company in the Netherlands. In
the following month we will launch a webshop which will have a estimated
1000 full hits in the first weeks (estimated through calculation of the
marketing-departement). I am writing the webshop, and have installed the
webserver. Because of issues with our housing, we can't put our HP
webserver to use, since it produces to much noise in our very small
building. Since we are moving in a few months, we decided to use a HP
laptop instead (reasonably fast CPU, 512 Megs) since we had a few to
spare.

The toy is currently set up with FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2, Apache 2.0, MySQL 5.0
and PHP-5.0 with all the reasonable modules. Everything is compiled from
ports. No changes to the kernel yet, no world-rebuilding done.

I trust the laptop enough to get the job done, but I wonder if 6.0-BETA2
will be up for the task. I heard rumours that it should be more stable and
faster then 5.4-RELEASE (which I use mostly nowadays), but it IS beta
after all. On the other hand, I get the impression that 6.0 is the release
of choice for deploying anything on a laptop (considering that darned
Pentium-M). Another thing, I do not fully trust the combination of Apache
2.0, MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.0, since they are all quite new in the
frontlines.

This would be a decent testcase for 6.0, but the thing is... I can't
afford any crashes (this webshop is considered to settle the future for
our company) and we are talking about a laptop here.

I will post all problems not yet reported to the list, but if anyone of
you would like to share his or her opinion on this matter, please let me
know. Will 4.11-RELEASE perhaps be a better choice?

I'm not subscribed to the list (allthough I follow the archives now and
then) so please CC me. Thanks.

-- 
Frans-Jan v. Steenbeek
Pakhuisweg 16-II
6718 XJ  Ede

T: 06-43536482
E: Frans-Jan at van-Steenbeek.net