> Without giving away an "trade secrets", the plan is to run a lot of
> separate MySQL server instances on a each machine (there will be
> "many" MySQL server machines). Each user will get a MySQL server (in
> the daemon sense, not the machine sense) all to themselves. Each
> MySQL server will run with a different uid. This will give us the
> ability to control the process using standard Unix process limits and
> all that good stuff.
We thought about that, but isn't that quite resource intensive? Even with
only a few hundred users, I don't think a single box could handle it. But
the same box should be able to easily handle the same number if it was a
single server. You'd have to set each server to use very little RAM for
buffers, which would cause a lot more disk and CPU overhead. Even when they
are all sitting idle, they are taking up memory. Is the problem not as bad
as I think it would be?
I think my idea for a modification makes more sense, since it better
utilizes resources. But if that's wrong, I'd really like to know why.
