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)