As a small note: while Linux is generally 'stable' in the non-relative sense of the term, even the hardiest OSes ever designed can crash when you set your apache MaxClients too high while running mod_perl Apache with MySQL... as I have recently discovered. There exists a point at which even the most perfect OS available can find itself screaming under too high a load and end up locking up from using all its CPU to swap because the real memory ran out three days ago B^)