"My suspicion is that the 5 mbps going outbound plus the 8 aolservers are chewing up the cpu out of the one box."
Your "suspicion", eh? Well, what does "top" or whatever it is on Solaris (prstat?) say?
I'd like to hear what Mark D. has to say about the whole situation. Between a multi-threaded web server and a fairly scalable RDBMS running on a commercial UNIX, it would be interesting to see what it is that you think is "chewing up the cpu out of the one box".
I'm rather surprised that 5 mbps outbound is burning up CPU cycles on a commercial SMP UNIX box. A single-CPU SGI workstation from 1997 could pump out uncompressed D1 (a.k.a. CCIR 601) video (about a megabyte/sec.) without batting an eyelash on the processor side.
Before Philip initiated the image-uploading services, the photo.net Q&A forum database was rather puny (50 megs or so). If photo.net implemented file uploading in the filesystem, then yes, RAID-5 might be a good solution combined with RAID-10 for the database itself.
Of course, if someone decided to cram everything into the database, well, that probably would have earned that person a spanking from Philip. Without any more specifics from the photo.net team, it's really hard to recommend anything at all.
Good luck with your database migration.
