Feeling Fantastic in Florence

I've been porting www.megagames.com from an old in-house Perl based "publishing" system (ah, the good ol' days when men were men and  databases were text files).

We're on to deployment now, so I've been boning up on best practices for deployment for a fairly high-traffic site.

While there isn't any cut and dried response through Google or Drupal.org, this thread presents a fairly good look at various aspects of the issue, and happily shows that Drupal is perfectly capable of handling lots of traffic.

We're going to go with 3 servers, in the end.  One for the database and two to handle HTTP traffic.  The HTTP servers will go behind a round-robin DNS feed.

Since we won't be using an asset manager for serving images (the site has thousands of thumbnails and screenshots), I've decided try something new (for me, at least).

I'm going to mount the files directory (through sshfs) for one of the HTTP servers, so that all of the image files will live in one physical place.  This avoids the issue of having to mirror images from one server to another.

Once everything is up and running, I'll post the final configuration details.