[jason|xoxide]

Originally Posted by Erwin

Well, that's not exactly true - having 2 post tables, even if they're on the same server, and only search one of them will reduce table locking and may reduce loads overall associated with that. However, it's better to offload search to a separate slave server.

That's what I thought. The box I have seems to be more than powerful enough to handle the sites as long as there is little-to-no table locking.

I have a second server "available" (for testing, not permanent use) and I tried setting up a slave server a month or so ago but it didn't go well. For one, no "CREATE TABLE", "ALTER TABLE", or "DROP TABLE" statements were replicated to the slave. That means that any time I upgraded vBulletin or made some other DB change that those changes would not be replicated and the slave would break. Next, I had problems with the connection between the servers being dropped. Finally, when it did work, the site actually seemed slower for general use (but without the load peaks from searches).