This is one of the questions that always raises the temperature of the discussion, akin to Local versus Remote monitoring, or Case-Sensitive Filenames versus Case-Insensitive Filenames, or Ginger versus Mary Ann.

And the reason is there are benefits to both approaches.

The main benefit is having the Argent database on a separate machine is distributed load – the CPU is not shared by both Argent and the database management system; the drawback is the network connection between the two machines.

So, in general, in the fullness of time, all things being equal, we recommend having the database on the same machine as Argent. Reason being the network connection almost always less reliable than the internal data channel on the single server. So the weakest link is the network connection.

Moore’s Law helps us as well. (if you want an interesting corollary: “what was the size of your hard drive 10 years ago compared to today?”. Makes Gordon Moore’s law look poor by comparison).