Advise on hardware upgrade

I would like to have your opinions on how to upgrade the server hardware
here:
Currently:
Windows 2000 Server SP2
Dual Intel Pentium III 1,2 GHz
2 GB RAM
Harddisks are on a SAN, so they are not needed to upgrade
MS-SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, no other apps run on this machine
The SQL Server hosts a single database, size approx 3 GB, growing by about
10% per month. 60 highly concurrent users, in fact doing the same things at
the same time. The largest table has about 9.000.000 records, daily
increment 9000.
When the users start their tasks, I encounter - due to the intense
concurrency - performance degradation, although the overall performance is
ok. These peaks are beyond the servers capabilities. I monitored using the
performance monitor:
Processor Queue lenght: average 0,58 max 15
% Processor Time Processor 0 average 15,5 max 41,9 (but I have seen peaks up
to 90% as well)
% Processor Time Processor 1 average 19,5 max 61,1
% Privileged Time Processor 0 average 1,5 max 7,1
% Privileged Time Processor 1 average 1,3 max 5,7
I would recommend upgrading to a 4 processor system with Pentium 4 3,2 GHz
What´s your opinion?
Thanks for your input.
BerndStrange that nobody seems to have an opninion on this topic. Is there a
reason why?
TIA
Bernd
"Bernd Maierhofer (dato)" <bernd.maierhofer@.dato.at> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:en172$OqDHA.2500@.TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> I would like to have your opinions on how to upgrade the server hardware
> here:
> Currently:
> Windows 2000 Server SP2
> Dual Intel Pentium III 1,2 GHz
> 2 GB RAM
> Harddisks are on a SAN, so they are not needed to upgrade
> MS-SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, no other apps run on this machine
> The SQL Server hosts a single database, size approx 3 GB, growing by about
> 10% per month. 60 highly concurrent users, in fact doing the same things
at
> the same time. The largest table has about 9.000.000 records, daily
> increment 9000.
> When the users start their tasks, I encounter - due to the intense
> concurrency - performance degradation, although the overall performance is
> ok. These peaks are beyond the servers capabilities. I monitored using the
> performance monitor:
> Processor Queue lenght: average 0,58 max 15
> % Processor Time Processor 0 average 15,5 max 41,9 (but I have seen peaks
up
> to 90% as well)
> % Processor Time Processor 1 average 19,5 max 61,1
> % Privileged Time Processor 0 average 1,5 max 7,1
> % Privileged Time Processor 1 average 1,3 max 5,7
> I would recommend upgrading to a 4 processor system with Pentium 4 3,2 GHz
> What´s your opinion?
> Thanks for your input.
> Bernd
>