While many great minds are here, I would like to focus on one point for a moment, which in my experience, has been the most critical:
The database Before I were to ask any other of your questions (all of which were valid), I would ask myself: - What kind of database tables am I implementing? (innodb, berkley,etc) What effect do they have on the filesystejm, or the pagefile? - How have I defined connections, connection pooling, shared resources, partitions v logical drives, semaphores v shared memory handles to handles? - Have I analyzed which tables actually get used, and by which processes, and paid attention to which operations only require simple foreign to primary key relationships, and not complex JOINS? And secondarily: - Is it possible to set up simple READ-ONLY copies of frequently read but rarely changed data (such as login information) so that some work could be off-loaded in an intelligent manner without regards to load balancing? In short, the database's interaction with the main application is most commonly the issue, regardless of the underlying technologies. Start there, so says I. Matthew P gedanken -- Matthew Paluch 404.375.8898
