There is the Linux Virtual Server project for making a load balancer. I don't know how far that will scale. The right commercial loadbalancers can easily scale to hundreds of megabits per second and many thousand requests per second. I have good experiences with that using equipment from Foundry Networks (http://www.foundrynetworks.com/).

If you are using CGI now, the first thing you should do to scale better would be installing mod_perl.

The best way to scale MySQL (and other SQL databases) is by caching as much as possibly as close to the application as possibly. http://develooper.com/modperl/

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ask bjoern hansen, http://ask.netcetera.dk/   !try; do();