larousse - single PIII/866
pliny - dual Athlon 2600+
new machine - dual Athlon 2600+
db server - dual opteron mega server
With this setup, we can have larousse act as the load balancer
frontend for the 2 webservers pliny and new, which can be mirror
images of each other. This is much cleaner than any sort of dns-based
setup.
Also, in the short run, it will permit us to just put the intl-wikis
on the new machine and keep en on the existing machine, or something
similar, which should be a pretty reasonable way to load balance as
well while we work out the details of the other architecture.
The PIII/866 is *more* than powerful enough to do iptables load
balancing, if anyone is wondering about that. I've done this before,
and you can handle a ton of traffic with not a lot of hardware,
because packet rewriting is easy.
And once we have this structure in place, one great thing is that it's
very scalable -- to increase capacity we just add extra webservers,
which can go into the mix seamlessly.
--Jimbo