> How often does the data change and how critical is it to have real-time > results. Web sites often have thousands of people getting copies of the > same thing, or at least computed from the same values even if they are > the same only for a short period of time. The servers will exchange sensitive data hopefully with a latency of < 50ms. Ping time between them is 20ms. > One approach is to put > memcached between your web application and the database for extremely > fast repeated access to the same data. It is just a cache layer, though, > you still need a persistent database underneath. > http://www.danga.com/memcached/ > Ahh, thanks. I forgot about memcached. I am presently using some in-memory MySQL tables, but I'll have to benchmark this against memcached. But the 2nd server was procured to relieve the CPU load on the main one. Even with a 16-way Opteron, this situation would have had to be faced eventually. It looks to me like OpenAMQ will be the ultimate solution I'm amazed that RedHat with a finger in almost every opensource pie hasn't backed this or come out with their own competing option, since it appears to tie in very nicely with clusters.