New Design
We’re testing out a new design where the webserver that feeds our site does not house the database of the site, but rather the old webserver that fed this site and its database is now only feeding the database.
Following along so far?
When a page is requested, this webserver calls out to the database webserver for the data and then assembles the page in real-time. The idea is to distribute the load as both of these servers are identical in horsepower. One does the web serving and the other is free to handle database queries.
Ideally these two servers would be on a gigabit private network so they can talk with each other at a faster speed than the outside world is requesting to be fed.
It’s not exactly as clean as I’m stating it because the old webserver is still serving up directly (in addition to the new webserver) because DNS propagation will take all weekend. At the point when the old server is no longer serving up any requests, we’ll shut down web services on the old web server forcing queries to come to the new web server. For a very brief time, our site will be pseudo load balanced by two webservers feeding from one central database.
For the folks we let down over the past 2 days, we’re very sorry. Know that we’re doing everything we can to rebuild our site so that it returns to high-speed for again.
Chris,
Are your doing a cluster? Or just a plain dedication of services to separate the load.
Glenn
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