Your question's is a bit too broad, but let me tell you what I know. The first question you need to ask yourself is: are you read-bound or write-bound? A "gen

Your question's is a bit too broad, but let me tell you what I know. The first question you need to ask yourself is: are you read-bound or write-bound? A "generic" advice for databases is that you -don't- want to have multiple small boxes when one big box will do. Managing many machines is complex both from the sysadmin and developer points of view. Instead, get a machine with as much ram as you can and disks as fast as possible (raid 0 really helps), cpu doesn't matter too much for databases. Obviously, don't expect to run your DB on a i486 ;-) If your box can't cope with writes (disk too slow), you'll need to either increase the write speed of your machine again (more disks in a raid 0 array) or "shard" your data. You want to avoid that as much as you can, not fun. If your box is read-bound (ie: is slow at reading), then you can start thinking about replication to multiple machines. But quite frankly, I think you got it all wrong. Don't bother about scaling and improving performance now because it's almost impossible for you to know where the bottleneck is going to be anyways. I've never used Symfony, so I don't know anything particular about it, but I don't think the framework is going to cause problems database-wise.