Re: building a web farm (Apache Users)

Thanks for the replies.

Well, I forget to mention that we run on AIX, not on Linux. And so it is. The files MUST be consistent in any moment of time. There is a period of time when a lot of pages are changing in every 5 minutes. Well, rsync is used to push the changes, mixed with some other tools, but these changes are pushed to only one node and become available on the others immediately.
Well, it is late night now and a few minutes of googling did not put up anything related to "Running DRBD on AIX"... I will check the others tomorrow.

Thanks,

--Trifo

2013/10/31 Mark H. Wood <mwood@xxxxxxxxx>

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 09:54:14AM +0100, trifo wrote:
> I am running a web site using Apache httpd on several server nodes to
> provide high availability and performance. At present, the web content
> resides on a clustered filesystem (GPFS) to ensure that all the nodes serve
> the same content in any moment.
>
> Well, GPFS is quite an expensive product, thus the management tries to get
> rid of it. Now my question is this: how to build a high performance
> environement without a clustered filesystem? Where to store the html files,
> and how to ensure the consistency between nodes?

Get a cheaper product? DRBD perhaps? GFS2? Lustre? can iRODS do what
you need? If I understand how GPFS works, you might wind up buying
much more storage, but everyone keeps saying that storage is cheap....

> (we have mostly static html pages, but over 400k of them. And there is a
> part which changes regularly)

Does the content have to be absolutely identical 100% of the time, or
can occasional changes ripple through the system on a scale of seconds
to minutes? rsync is free. How volatile are your volatile pages?

--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@xxxxxxxxx
Machines should not be friendly. Machines should be obedient.