Thank you for the advice. MySQL isn't an issue. We're running the db on a seperate box behind the firewall.

Actually, that's what started this current migration. The old machine used to run MySQL and the search scripts, but was getting overloaded, so we added a new dedicated db server and redeployed the old box, switching to Apache to get output compression, persistent db connections and so forth.

Interestingly, I benchmarked MySQL (4.016, I think) on FreeBSD on the new machine (dual 2.8Mhz P4s) versus Windows 2003. Who'd have thunk? On loading 2.5 million records, Windows 2003 was faster by a fair margin. The same was true for W2K as it was either about the same or slower than FreeBSD. As I recall, the reasons were largely due to hyperthreading on the P4 as W2K3 sees 2 CPUs for each processor along with other performance improvements in W2K3.

I've got the FreeBSD 4.9 install disks, so I'll give it a go. I appreciate the porting tips. We're trying to keep the code as generic as possible so that it can also run in a standard perl environment, so we should be ok there, but will take a hard look at the migration docs.

Rod