Hi,
Just some thoughts on this subject.
First off, don't do anything until you understand the problem. It's worth getting a consultant (or us) to spend half an hour to look at your system and identify where the bottleneck is. There could be a number of possible reasons such as: a bad global that is doing an unoptimized sql call, a misconfigured mod_perl/apache server, a single cgi that could be optimized to be faster, insufficent hardware, missing perl modules, etc. It's important to get someone to determine exactly what the bottleneck is, otherwise you can be improving things needlessly (splittling a site onto two servers when really it could have been handled fine on one for example).
Some common ways to scale your Links SQL install as you get more and more traffic:
1. Move to mod_perl. Set this up properply as a dual apache solution, don't use a single apache with mod_perl enabled or you will quickly run your machine out of memory. This will be your largest performance improvement, and allow you to get more traffic out of a single machine.
2. Move mysql to a separate machine. This would only be recommended on a large directory (> 100,000 links), as small directories do not use much in the way of mysql resources.
3. Move mod_perl to a separate machine. Leave a single machine to handle all image, html requests, and setup apache to proxy all mod_perl requests to the second machine seamlessly.
Hope this helps, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Cheers,
Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.