I have a scenario where the database is in one server and web server is on another server. I know the response time will be affected by this. But is it adivisable to have webserver and database server on seperate machines/network.

How are you accessing a database from a server different than the web page? I didn't think this was possible, because of security issues.

It really depends on your network/infrastructure set up.

Personally I always work this way. It allows the web server to be specificly configured for servering web pages and the database server to be configured specificalyl for running databases which gives you some nice performance increases.

You can configure your network so your database is only accessible from the web server, where as the web server needs to be accessible to the world, this allows your database to be more secure.

Well my firm has Oracle10g on an independant server and ASP application runs from another server & we have the ASP application published in the net also. We use application developed using developer 2000 to insert modify delete data from the database and our IIS application does the display, limited editing interphase for a visitor or user. I hardly found any speed related issues even when we were displaying more than 30,000 records at a time through the web interface & it is always advisable to run Oracle independant from a dedicated server.