I have a site hosted on a RackShack.net RaQ4i. I am concerned that the machine will not be able to handle the mod_perl scripts; when it gets 20 simultaneous connections, the machine's load average goes over 10.0 and CPU usage is at 100%.

So, I'm thinking about having the mod_perl scripts hosted on a PIII server somewhere else, but still having the images hosted on the RaQ4i to save bandwidth costs.

I'm wondering if I can have the PIII mount the RaQ4i's disk over NFS. The PIII would be in a different data center. I'd like to be able to do this so that when I add a new image to the image gallery using the admin interface (which would be on the PIII), it can automatically make the thumbnails.

Or is it a stupid idea to do NFS over TCP/IP, and I should think of some other way to do this?

NFS already uses TCP/IP.... but, you should be aware that there are many secuirty related issues with NFS, and thr RPC services it uses....

Yeah, I just realized that. I should have said "NFS over the internet", as opposed to "NFS over a LAN", which is how NFS is usually used, I believe.

Yes...NFS *can* be done over the Internet but it specifically says that's very, very bad (speed, latency, security) in the docs.

I'd recommend finding a different way to do it, like a Perl script that listens on a port and can recieve images, and writes them to a file (20 lines or so :) ).