Velvet Elvis

Yes. One caches complied php and the other mysql queries. They do completely different things.

I'm also running APC.

Memcached is not the same thing as an opcode cache. It directly caches database queries, more like mysql's query cache.

I installed the package from the debian archive with 'sudo aptitude install memcached.' I kept all the default settings in /etc/memcached.conf. If you have buckets of memory to spare you might want to consider raising the value for -m, but otherwise I'd leave everything as is. I added the following to conf_global.php in the IPB root directory.

$INFO['use_memcache'] = 1;
$INFO['memcache_server_1'] = "127.0.0.1";
$INFO[memcache_port_1'] = "11211";

I use 'mysqldump -u root -p --opt databasename | gzip > databasename.day.month.year.gz'

I used to use backupninja on my old server to automate everything including downloads to my local PC but haven't gotten around to setting it up on my current server.

I haven't needed to go the replication route, but using memcached with just the default debian settings made a huge difference in my database load. Give it a try if you haven't.

another handy tool:

http://hackmysql.com/mysqlreport

FWIW, all distros backport security fixes so even if you have 5.2.6 rest assured that you have the latest security patches.

I think CentOS and RHEL backport fixes across years.

The latest release just means it's more likely to have undetected bugs.

I've been running nothing but debian stable since sarge.

Don't forget about memcached btw.