On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 00:03, Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
Sorry for my newbies question, but there's something i dont understand. Many web site around the world have only one DB server and many load balancing web server. Slashdot for example IIRC. Ok it must be a quadri processor... but it's very fast !
I'm not really sure, that pliny is the bottleneck.
At the moment, for the most part it's not -- because we've turned off a lot of features that are heavy on the database. Searching, 'wanted pages', 'orphans', etc.
Of course, it's further loaded down by serving web pages for everything but the English-language site, since larousse is much too loaded by that to take the rest on.
The Larousse server is a piii866, it's a bit short for what we want to do I think. I hope the next upgrade will improve Larousse, then we'll can move other wikis to it. And we'll see if Pliny is really the bottleneck.
The current upgrade plan is to upgrade both pliny and larousse to similar levels (dual Athlon 2800s, iirc), and hopefully get the web load better handled. This should happen in the next few days. Hopefully we'll get warning before the downtime, which hopefully will be short. :)
Then there is talk of next getting a big honkin' server for the database, which will leave pliny free as a second web server.
Database replication meanwhile can be handy for several things:
* Live backup server! If the master database server dies, but we've got a replicated server keeping up constantly, we can switch over to it fairly quickly and stay online.
* Performance. If we get all those slow things turned back on, the load on the database will increase. Relatively slow check-a- hojillion-pages operations could be run from a slave server without affecting performance for everyday reading & writing.
* Mirroring? An offsite server with its own copy of the database being updated live could provide a more (or perhaps fully-) functional mirror, offloading traffic from the main server and somewhat reducing response times (for read-only operations at least) for people far from North America.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)