Actually, I think the best win would come from having
OLD on the
filesystem. CUR would be excellent, too. As it is, OLD has complete
copies of every edit ever made, and it forces MySQL to consume an
unholy amount of memory. :(
There's nothing magical about filesystems--the same work has to be
done whether the data is in a database or a filesystem. However it is
true that filesystems tend to be optimized for different kinds of
access patterns than databases, and those access patterns may be
better suited to big chunks of text.
Also, I don't see why the size of the old table has anything to do
with the amount of memory used by MySQL. There's almost no difference
in performance between a database with 10,000 entries and one with
100,000 entries. A more significant win is likely to be reducing the
size of the /individual records/, perhaps by putting the full text in
the filesystem and just having pointers and stats in the database.
Moving only the old data to the filesystem would also be less of a
problem than moving the cur records, because we don't have the
problem of losing MySQL's fulltext index, which we need to keep for
the cur table to implement the search function.
Another win for the two-server setup might be keeping old text in
the front-end file system rather than the database machine, to reduce
traffic over the wire.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC