[Q] High Transaction Load Solution?

Hey guys,

I orignally wrote a post here regarding some info on setting up a cluster. Upon further analysis of the problem with our system, I noted that at particular times we have tremendous amounst of Update, Insert, Delete etc, transactions hitting out database.

I thought originally SQL Clustering could solve this problem, but the time and upkeep that will be required to maintain such a configuration might not be feasible and more importantly it may not even fix the problem.

Next week I plan on doing some more specific performance monitoring off the database during normal business activity, but my initial suspicion is that there is a tremendous amount of I/O processing due to the high transaction load which is slowing down the application.

I was wondering what you have done to alleviate such problems? One of the solutions I have come up with is to possibly create a Master/Slave SQL Server design where the Slave handles most of the database transactions and then at a low load during the day update the Master DB. How does this sound? Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated...

Thanx