Here we grow again! This question pertains to
www.markeedragon.com that is running UBB 7.2.2. We just upgraded to using multiple load balanced web servers and a dedicated MySQL server. We are having 8 second average load times on the forums. 4 seconds of this is the template we use. It's very image heavy. The other 4 seconds is ubbthreads.php. I've seen other threads talk about the DB being the biggest factor in performance for the forums.
We are already running on a dual core Xeon server with mirrored drives and 4gb of memory. We are sometimes getting slammed during peak hours. God forbid we get Slashdotted or or Dugg. We have seen just shy of 4000 simotanious people in the forums when this happens.
So this is a long build up to the question of is we could benefit from running mirrored MySQL servers. Having them load balanced? It's a function of MySQL and I don't think any special support is needed from UBB to support this.
Does anyone see any issues with this? Does anyone use multiple mirrored DB servers? We do plan on doing this even if we just mirror the servers but all of the calls still go to just one. That way if a master server fails the slave can pick up and keep going.
Anyway. Any advise or experience shared would be appreciated.