[matthewmacleod]

That is one dangerous assumption you made there mr. Performance (in terms of response times, IO waits, etc) can be severely affected in distributed designs.

That's why there's an 'almost' in there. You're right that distributed systems have a different set of challenges, but if you're developing a system that requires the kind of incredibly fast response times that will stress a distributed system, you're already into territory where general 'this is good guidance for web apps' advice doesn't apply to you.

[ukigumo]

Fair enough, you have a point there because I skipped the "almost" from your previous comment somehow.