On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 17:50:33 -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote:
This may be an old idea, or not. But the thought of modularizing did bring a thought to mind that is related to how Ebay does things...
What if the articles in a certain alphabetic range were stored on one server, and those in another alphabetic range stored on another? A third server stands in front doing nothing more than redirecting traffic to the other servers. It might make statistics and such a bit more of a headache, but it would certainly assist in reducing the bandwidth requirements of the server.
Google does the same, i guess any really big DB application has to.
Whether such an implementation would be simplistic or terribly difficult requires a greater understanding of the underlying architecture than I have.
There would be a need to write logic to merge the separate result sets.
The temporary DB server is a very small machine with something like 1Gb ram. Geoffrey (with 4Gb) was fast before it went down, a second server is ordered that can do reads in the new setup. I'd also expect the DB to be the weakest spot in the new setup, but at a completely different level. The number of DB connections should drop by 50% or so (even more with memcached), the amount of ram will be sufficient to hold most of the DB in ram, with the option to top it up to 16Gb on each machine.