Van: You might want to ask about RH partitioning in a separate thread, and I'm not a large server hardware performance expert, but I'd think that putting / and /boot on the boot drive, and everything else (including /usr and /var and /home) on the RAID array would make sense? So (just as an example) you might consider:
/boot 64MB on boot disk
/ rest of boot disk
/usr 3GB on RAID
/home 2GB on RAID
/tmp 2GB on RAID
swap (2x RAM) on RAID
/altboot 64MB on RAID
/altroot 2GB on RAID
/var rest of RAID
as a more or less reasonable starting point?
The idea of /altroot and /altboot partitions on the RAID is that you would backup / and /boot to them very often (say every 12 hours or whatever), automatically, so that recovery from a boot disk failure would be simplified? Better still would be to mirror (RAID1) the boot disk, if that is a real concern.
I suspect that for many moderately sized OpenACS sites, with a modern 800MHz+ x86 CPU, adding RAM may well boost performance and scalability for your site more than going to RAID? If you think you'll be adding more RAM later, for a 2.4.x Linux kernel, consider providing 4x current RAM size for swap, so when you double the RAM later you'll still have 2x RAM for swap space...
And be sure you use Don's PG parameter tweaks so PG uses more RAM buffer space than its miserly defaults, too.
BTW, it looks like the separate aolserver-nsxml RPM idea is going to work fine -- I wish I'd thought of doing it that way (via the %package command in the .spec file) much sooner!
