Subject: Inquiry
> Do you have specific reasons for Gentoo as opposed
> to any other *nix?
> In my honest opinion, vBulletin just isn't designed
> for this _type_ of load.
>
> daniel.

There's lots of forums even bigger than this site that run vB, granted they've
got coders on staff to tweak & modify things as needed :)

I'd really rather keep Gentoo on the server for a few reasons. 1. it's
far easier for me to tweak & modify things server-wise with Gentoo than
it is with a pre-compiled distro.  2. Optimizations Optimizations
Optimizations.  3. I really haven't found another distro that runs half
as well, or half as stable on ReiserFS as Gentoo. 4. I'm far more
familliar with Gentoo than any of the red hat clones, Debian, Slackware
or SuSe.

The reason I'm suggesting this monster DB server is because we went from
around 4200 users online (15 minute snapshot during peak hours, to 5800
users online during peak hours in just 2 weeks. The current database
server CAN handle it, but querys start taking some time, especially with
lots of disk access.  I'm really not sure why the disks on that server
are so slow. the disk on db2 seems to transfer data much faster.  I can
copy the entire database in 6 minutes on db2, whereas it takes around 11
minutes on db1. The database, by the way, is around 10GB.

The new database server will be the foundation and core of the future
SSC setup.  The next step for the database backend is to move to a load
balanced mysql cluster.  As long as that server can stay in place for a
year or so, we can save the money to proceed with the next step.  If
traffic doubles every 8 months like it has over the past couple years,
the new db1 and the current db1 should manage the load for about 1 1/2 -
2 years, possibly more if I use memcache more.

Which reminds me, db2 will be used as a memcache server. :)

Anyway, if you really don't think you can get Gentoo working on that
machine, I'm open to suggestions. 


Mike