Oh I remember those days. In our case, it was because we had so much website data that we couldn't keep it all in cache, so when the site became busy enough, pe

Oh I remember those days. In our case, it was because we had so much website data that we couldn't keep it all in cache, so when the site became busy enough, performance fell off a cliff as we became disk I/O bound. We had maxed out our main server with 512MB of RAM. We couldn't afford the new Sun Ultra 2's that would have given us a spacious 2GB of RAM, so we ended up coding a front-end to shard requests across the 2 web servers and used a Sparcstation 5 to run that front-end. Eventually we rearchitected the entire site to move the static HTML websites into an Oracle database. (by then we had upgraded to a Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000, which could handle up to 6GB of memory, more than we could ever use)