Scaling Drupal
John Quinn writes about Scaling Drupal he is taking a one step at a time approach and is still writing his 4th and 5 stages.
His first step obviously is separating the drupal from a separate database server, and he chooses mysql for this purpose, moving your DB to a different machine is a good thing to do.
However then he gets this crazy idea of using NFS to share his his drupal shared files :(
(he even dares to mention that the setup ease is good) Folks, we abandonned NFS in the late nineties. NFS is still a recipe for disaster, it has performance issues , it as stability issues (stale locks), and no security admin in his right mind will tolerate portmap to be running in his DMZ.
(Also think about the IO path that one has to follow to serve a static file to a surfer when the file is stored on a remote NFS volume)