hi... i'm trying to determine which is the better way/approach to go. should an app do a great deal of file i/o, or should it do a great deal of read/writes to a mysql db... my test app will create a number of spawned child processes, 1000's of simultaneous processes, and each child process will create data. the data will ultimately need to be inserted into a db. Approach 1 ----------- if i have each child app write to a file, i'm going to have a serious hit on the disk, for the file i/o, but i'm pretty sure Centos/RH could handle it. (although, to be honest, i don't know if there's a limit to the number of simultaneous file descriptors that the OS allows to be open at the same time.) i'm assuming that the number is multiples of magnitudes more than the number of simultaneous connections i can have with a db.... i could then have a process/app collect the information from each output file, writing the information to the db, and deleting the output files as required. Approach 2 ---------- i could have each child app write to a local db, with each child app, waiting to get the next open db connection. this is limited, as i'd run into the max connection limit for the db. i'd also have to implement a process to get the information from the local db, to the master db. .. Approach 3 ----------- i could have each child app write directly to the db.. the problem with this approach is that the db has a max regarding the number of simultaneous connections, based on system resources. this would be the cleanest solution.. so... anybody have any thoughts/comments as to how one can essentially accept 1000's-10000's of simultaneous hits with an app... i've been trying to find out if there's any kind of distributed parent/child/tiered kind of app, where information/data is more or less collected and received at the node level... thanks -bruce