Posted by Richard Davey on 04/22/05 14:25

Hello Drewcore / Jochem,

Friday, April 22, 2005, 4:45:37 AM, you wrote:

D> are you talking about having one server in south america that acts
D> as your database server, one server in asia that's your web server,
D> and then another server in north america that servers some other
D> task?

Not really - the scenario is more like this:

There is a primary set of servers in the US (one web, one DB, one file
server) - this handles all the "master" content (in English) as well
as the user logins, shop, etc. Content is translated to several
languages which the user can pick from, the site handles this just
fine. This all exists now.

But a vast majority of our customers live in Europe, and smaller but
no less significant sets in Russia and Japan, so duplicating this
content across a set of servers physically located there would be
extremely beneficial for them (speed-wise) where they don't all live
on the end of ADSL/cable connections.

The question originally was the best way to ensure these slaves
provide the exact same content as the master does.

For example one approach could be to sync the content on a file level,
perhaps another is that when the master CMS is updated these changes
are then propagated to the slaves in sequence (i.e. something done
from the PHP code itself rather than on a system level). It's really a
form of load balancing I guess, but application design for this kind
of environment is inherently different to the "all sits on one box"
that most people only have to deal with.

Further digging around has revealed this book on the subject:

"Multi-Tier Application Planning with Php: Practical Guide for Programmers"

(which I've ordered). I also found slides by Theo Schlossnagle from his
Scalable Internet Architecture talk at ApacheCon this year. Both these
things are addressing the design issues I'm now faced with, I'm just
extremely surprised no-one here has encountered them before.

Best regards,

Richard Davey
--
http://www.launchcode.co.uk - PHP Development Services
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov

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