One more piece can now be added to making a fast site with Any Database and PHP Apache, connection pooling with, in our case, SQLRelay. Gotta have connetion pooling, the one persistant connection per child with Apache PHP is/was killing our DB machine. So too add to the complexity of maintaining Apache to run high performance load balanced web servers add SQLRelay, Lingerd, kernel tweaks and config file tricks and you will be wishing for the simple days of AOLServer and Any Database!
Don:
I think our numbers will be changing dramatically once we get SQLRelay installed and working. We did not track the state of table size between vacuums, I did not even know that it was something to watch closely. They were run as cron jobs and we don't track the end time of the cron job, so I don't know how long the vacuums took.
As far as moving to 7.2 I don't see that happening soon, I had to kick scream and yell in order to get the powers that be to move to 7.1 and then we got bit by a new reserved word that we were using in a lot of our code. It was not that hard to fix, but the powers that be don't allways understand. I didn't even know that 7.2 had a different vacuum scheme available. I might have to sneak it in now.
I would be interested in looking at how you will be testing OpenACS platform. I don't know that much about OpenACS but I have learned enough to date that little changes in the test can have huge effects on their validity. Getting a 'tool' to load test a site in a representative way is pretty difficult. Where can I see what you guys are up too?
I guess if I did not spend my days trying to get Apache/PHP to work as well as AOLServer has for me in the past I would be able to reply quicker!
