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