Hello again guys,

One of our website is gaining a lot of popularity the last 6 months. Based on our investigation the current server (LAMP stack on a single quadcore xeon 8GB RAM RAID5 SATAII) will not be able to hold the load as it shares a couple of other websites.

We are thinking of getting another box with the same specs however none of us have the experience on high performance i.e. do we distribute the sites on the 2 servers or do we distribute MySQL from Apache/PHP.

If you guys can point out articles that could help us lead to a decision or a book it will be much appreciated. Of course your own insights' a treasure first hand.

TA

If it's not too late, I'd suggest getting a new machine spec'd for a database server, meaning faster drives and GB NICs. This may be within the same price range of your first box but it should give you a big performance boost instead of just scaling your websites in which you will still be exposed with MySQL bottlenecks from your first box's hardware configuration.

Also, if you have not done so, High Performance MySQL book from O'Reilly is a good read.

As always, goodluck!