D Steward wrote: >> 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. That's not the relevant question. How often does the data change relative to the number of times you re-use it? >> 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. The big advantage of memcached is that you can distribute it over as many servers as you need to keep everything in RAM - and have it shared by any number of clients. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com