Quad Opterons + FreeBSD + Lighttpd + FastCGI/PHP + APC = Fast vB :)
 

Yup, I migrated my forums to new servers (dual xeon to quad opterons) using completely new software - FreeBSD, Lighttpd instead of Apache. Lighttpd is really amazing, and I recommend that everyone switch from Apache to Lighttpd. APC works fine on the setup too. Just sharing.

Good to hear everything is going well. ;)

FreeBSD is quite a robust OS with a very good upgrade system. I highly recommend it as a good basis for a server.

Well, all benchmarks I saw suggest otherwise - FreeBSD scales worse than Linux in multiprocessor setup. YMMV, of course, but I also can't see how the FreeBSD ports system is superiour to the yum/apt repositories. And if you're into recompiling everything to tune up for your system, Gentoo's ebuilds are just for that.

edit: I see that you didn't make it to SoftLayer...

Sounds good, Erwin. Thanks for sharing your experience with this setup.
I'm wondering if I could get away with something like this. My new Adaptec SAS RAID controller card doesn't have the widest range of drivers available yet, thus I'm using CentOS 4.1 rather than the latest version.
I'm always down for going faster ;)

how is converting apache over to lighhtpd

Erwin, did you notice less load on the servers vs apache? Any optimizations? I converted to lighttpd but didn't see a noticable drop in load but the pages are generated slightly faster.

hmm i guess im gonna switch from apache =]

but i like gentoo as my OS =]

Only if you compile the wrong kernel. :) FreeBSD 6.0 using AMD64 SMP kernel on a Quad Opteron just plain flies.

Ports are better than yum/rpm because ports automatically fixes all broken dependencies and installs everything automatically using 1 command: portinstall apache or portinstall mysql5

Can't get any easier than that. ;)

The only downfall of FreeBSD is its lack of driver support - I had to change my RAID card and go with a RAID 10 rather than a 0+1 setup. But it's all good.