domain vs. TCP/IP sockets & load balancing

I seem to recall that a while back the received wisdom was that communication with a database was _significantly_ faster over domain sockets than over TCP/IP sockets, so that a load balancing scheme based on putting the SQL server and the webserver on different hosts was likely to be futile, even if there was sufficient bandwidth (e.g. 100 MBit Ethernet) between the two hosts. Is this database specific? Is it nonsense? What do you do if you want load balancing with an SQL server in the middle? Does anyone have any pointers to further information about this question? Cheers Frank -- frank joerdens joerdens new media urbanstr. 116 10967 berlin germany e: frank@joerdens.de t: +49 (0)30 69597650 f: +49 (0)30 7864046 h: http://www.joerdens.de pgp public key: http://www.joerdens.de/pgp/frank_joerdens.asc