What are our plans for the network architecture as soon as the new server arrives (sometime next week)?
At that time, we hope that larousse and pliny will both be successfully upgraded (though I believe that Jason has not yet successfully gotten 4 gig of RAM to work, but 2 gig each and dual Athlon 2800+ should be do-able) and equivalent to each other.
The DB server will be the DB server, that much we know for sure. :-)
Beyond that, I think that the easiest thing to do would be to have en served by one machine, and everything else by the other machine. Based on total article count, which is roughly comparable for en vs rest-of-the-world, that seems good, but is it really? What about traffic?
In the longer term, the right way to do this is not to load balance by domain names, but to load balance properly.
I have had very good success in the past using iptables and a configuration that looks a lot like this picture:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/2.0.1/topologies/lb-eg.html
Of course, I did this years ago, and the "poor man's" way -- I think there are probably packages (like ultramonkey!) that are quick solutions now.
The beauty of this kind of architecture is:
1. high availability -- if one webserving node falls over, traffic automatically goes to the ones that are still up
2. easy expandability -- just add more webservers, at $2000 a crack for 'good enough' machines, and install the software and there you go.
Anyhow, to really do something like this, we'd need one more machine, but it need not be very powerful, since it's only going to be doing NAT/IPTABLES stuff.
--Jimbo