I'm in the process of moving to 2 servers.. but really unsure how to do it.. Anyways currently on 1 server
Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz
2GB Ram
2x73GB SCSI HDD

If anyone can tell me how to seperate the apache & mysql to 2 different servers, i will be very thankful :)

Over 5.

I have a cluster setup, an image server and a db server.

All of my sites are hosted on them. Serve up over 20GB per second in bandwidth. They seem to be holding up well for the most part. At least it's easy to plug in more power.

What do you use for load bancing the db server?

At this point, we've got 1 server but I'm looking into moving to multiple or to one larger box because we're having real problems with table locking during searches.

The current hardware is Dual 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs, 4GB of RAM and (3) 73GB SCSI drives in RAID5. The biggest board on this box has 3M posts, 370K threads, and 53K members. There are generally 250-300 concurrent users during the day and ~400 in the evenings (default cookie timeout).

I'm considering moving to a Dual, dual-core Opteron 265 box w/ 6GB of RAM and (4) 73GB Drives in RAID5 but I don't know how much that's actually going to help the issues.

5x webserver (athlon XP3200+, 1 GB Ram, 2x80 MB Raid0)
[one of these is working as stagingserver and as attachment server]
1x dbserver (dual opterin 265, 4 GB RAM, 2x160 MB Raid0)
1x seperate (premium) webspace for all images except attachments & avatars
Load balancing is simply made by DNS round robin.

Our forum has: Threads: 204,011, Posts: 9,818,856, Members: 86,900, Currently Active Users: 2364 (310 members and 2054 guests)
Most users ever online was 3,750, 28.08.2007. at 12:15.
Currently Active Users: 2364 (310 members and 2054 guests) (aprox. 2000-3000)
post.MYD is 4294967244 big ..

All that has been running on one server since 11/2006:
SuperMicro H8DCR-3 AMD Opteron 270 with 12GB RAM, 2x73 GB SCSI 10k
Now we will setup second, MySQL server..

Very good point. I see 89 votes for 1 server. Those are not big boards, IMO.
In my books, a big board has at least 4 servers. :)

? In my books, a big board has a lot of members, forums, posts.. You can have forum with 10 members on 10 servers. And you can't tell that is big board. :rolleyes:

You are missing completely my point.
We are not talking about storage facilities, but live boards with millions of posts and thousands of users online.