Jimmy Wales wrote:
If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help,
I'll do it.
I'm trying to picture that in my mind ;-)
Seriously: Something that *might* help not only with that problem, but
would likely reduce server load (and thus, crashes in the first place)
would be to run apache and mysql on different servers. IIRC, this is
suggested by both apache and mysql online manuals. Question is wether to
put mysql on the slower or the faster machine (assuming they're not
identical).
Some (third) machine could just mirror the apache server machine and
jump in if the need arises (=apache machine crashes); it could even have
read-write access. Also, no need for up-to-the-minute backups etc.
We'd only get a problem if the mysql machine dies :-(
Magnus