Separate Web and DB servers

Howdy, Back in the olden days of Allaire and Macromedia, most of the text I read on web site architecture with Coldfusion mandated separate Web and DB servers. Do you feel that is still the case, or have things changed? My sense is that both CF and DBs like MySQL and SQL Server are still pretty decent memory hogs, especially if you are doing a lot of template and query caching, and carry a lot of data around in the SESSION and APPLICATION scopes. But I'd be interested in anyone else's thoughts. Thanks very much. -MOM

Mark, From my experience I would suggest still splitting up the DB and application servers for production environments. Although with the popularity of virtualization these days you don't have to have physically separate machines but just use separate virtual machines to run each server. The same issues that are documented on the web for the older versions of CF still apply to the newest version. I prefer separate environments for each server simple from a maintenance standpoint, debugging is a whole lot simpler. Just an FYI though, I've recently started reading a book called Release It! Design and Deply Production-Ready Software by Nygard (Pragmatic Programmers) and it gives some tremendous insight on production environments and patterns which you may find helpful considering your question. HTH. Best Regards, Donnie ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----