I think my explanation was not the clearest it could have been. Let's say for the moment that I have one wiki. That wiki is served by a load balancer in front of a server farm consisting of four Apache vhosts, one per physical server, each with its own copy of MediaWiki, LocalSettings.php, etc. Thus, a request for say http://wiki.domain.com/wiki/Main_Page (and thus all of its included images, css, js, etc.) is actually distributed by the load balancer across the four vhosts. Each of the four physical hosts NFS mounts the same shared directory from the single NFS server so that all four Apache vhosts have simultaneous read-write access to the same uploaded multimedia content.
In case that description is missing your point, I'll add that I do indeed rsync the NFS server's shared directory to another server nightly (I could easily shorten that interval), which in turn gets rsynced to an offsite server. So the NFS server is a single point of failure, but I do have both local and remote copies of the uploaded content. My desire is for increased reliability of that backend fileserver. Does that answer your question or am I still missing your point? :) Justin On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:41 PM, Jonathan Aquilina <eagles051...@gmail.com> wrote: > You are mentioning NFS why not use rsync to replicate to a 2ndary nfs > server and set it to run lets say every 5 to 10 min or how ever often you > want to keep the 2ndary server updated. > > On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Justin Lloyd <jclb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > Currently I have five wikis with the largest one being about 35k articles > > (109k pages) and pretty heavily trafficked. My basic server architecture > is > > four web servers behind a load balancer and with a single NFS server that > > shares out a directory that contains the upload directory content for > each > > of the five wikis, e.g. /wiki/wiki1, /wiki/wiki2, etc. (There are also > > MySQL and Memcached servers but they are not relevant to this > discussion.) > > Each web server mounts /wiki in one location, say /var/www/images and > each > > of the five MediaWiki instances on the server has its images subdirectory > > as a symlink to its corresponding subdirectory under the mount, e.g. > > /var/www/images/wiki2. > > > > Obviously the NFS server is a single point of failure but I've yet to > come > > up with a good alternative shared-filesystem architecture that doesn't > > require an expensive license like SNFS. > > > > Finally, I'm considering moving the whole shebang to AWS but using S3 > > directly on the web servers doesn't seem viable in this architecture. > > > > So I'm wondering how others are approaching the design of load balancing > > (multiple instances of) MediaWiki across multiple web servers while > > maintaining a single source for each wikis upload directory content. I'm > > willing to COMPLETELY reevaluate my wiki server architecture as long as > > it's fast and highly available, so all suggestions are welcome! > > > > Justin > > _______________________________________________ > > MediaWiki-l mailing list > > To unsubscribe, go to: > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > > > > > -- > Jonathan Aquilina > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
