We can live with the fact that it will take a little longer to process the images. The image processing is only done by 2 people, about once a month, just to save them time (they would do it with photoshop otherwise and it is really boring and time consuming). In fact, i might set up an automatic email when its finished. :-) In the future it might become an issue when people can edit their own ebooks. This project dates back to 1999, so a lot of it is legacy (a binary page definition data format...). We're thinking of moving to swf pages instead of images, as they currently are, that will reduce the time to be taken to convert a pdf by thousands and would increase the quality and reduce download times for end users, but it will take time to develop which is not at hand atm. We have been thinking about scaling issues as well for quite some time now... It was hard enough to get them to move to Linux, since i work in a .NET shop... Setting up load balancing is not a trivial task though and expensive to host. I'm the main software developer on this project and am too busy adding features and debugging ActionScript, C++ and PHP code to do that as well. Thanks for your thoughts though. Regards, Tim Tim-Hinnerk Heuer http://www.ihostnz.com On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Nathan Nobbe <quickshiftin@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:34 PM, German Geek <geek.de@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> cron is a good idea, havent thought about that. One could use the nice >> program then to give it the lowest priority, because other requests are more >> important than this and another server gives the issue of transfering files >> back and forth. Another soln would be to run it with & in the background >> (with nice) and then check if the file(s) exist on ajax calls to give >> feedback, this might actually be easier to implement. > > > nice'ing the process is a good idea, however, youll only prolong the time > it will take to accomplish those img manipulation tasks, and soon you'll > find yourself w/ a nice little backlog on your hands. > > what sounds to me to be the larger issue is pushing the limit on a single > box. in order to scale, youll need to spread the load somehow. you can > dodge the bullet now, but it will be back, if your sites popularity is > growing. > > just my 2c > > -nathan > >
