I see I didn't provide enough information for Sean:
I have done that analysis and seen that putting a frontend box and separate fileserver for photos should be a good move.
1> The 8 aolservers are usually at the top of the top list chewing up from 7% to 10% of the cpu each, and each one takes up 120-200Megs while it is running with a fair amount of caching. That is down from 300 - 400 megs from two years ago when rob was fixing all the memory leaks. We experimented for months while there were huge memory leaks in aolserver while rob was fixing them and what we finally concluded was that you need to run maxthreads of 10 per server for the best performance with respect to the multi-threaded behavior on the server and aolserver driver. Rob and markD have looked at photo.net. I am open to more suggestions.
2> images on photo.net are stored in the filesystem, but each image-display request require hitting the database for permissions and subsequently spewing the file out of the filesystem but when it is doing that it isn't holding a db handle.
