Comment Re:I've used MySQL and PHP on a reasonably big sit (Score 2, Insightful) 350
It got to the point where the slave servers (P4, 2GB RAM, Hardware RAID) could not keep up with the Master replication _and_ service SELECT queries. The data was too big for RAM (filesort) and the drives were not fast enough (2 drives mirrored). The Master is dual PIII 2Ghz, 2GB RAM , and fast RAID 5 hardware.
I ended up solving the problem with a hardware upgrade. I replaced all 4 servers with 1 Quad-Opteron 1.8GHz, 16 GB RAM, and _VERY_ Fast RAID 10 across 9 fast drives.
Please feel free to check it out. For the first time in a long time, I'm not affraid that the MySQL server will be the bottlenect in this very dynamic web site.
We use Linux, Apache 1.3.x, MySQL 4.0.x, and PHP 4.x to build the pages and generate XML to our Flash MX applications.
Flash heavy signt. Free registration required to access the coolest features (those which beat up the MySQL server).