THANK YOU!

> > > work and I only say should because I personally haven't tried
> storing
> > > PHP session information on an NFS share before. There was some
> recent
> > 
> > Then how do you share your session data between more than one web
> server?
> > You have session data in a database?
> 
> I don't need to. As described below, my load balancing device sends each
> session to the same machine it was originally directed to based on
> source IP. I believe LVS calls it the Persistent Port Solution
> (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/docs/persistence.html).
>  
> > > that IP as well. We use hardware layer4 switches in front of our
> systems
> > > to perform automatic load balancing, health detection and failover.
> The
> > > particular devices we use can maintain user session to one machine
> or
> > > the other, negating the need to store the PHP session information on
> the
> > > NFS box. This is essentially filling the role of the LVS and allows
> us
> > > to provide very high service availability.
> > 
> > Wow, must be nice to have that kind of money.  :)  How does a _switch_
> > know
> > how to maintain session data for the _application_ layer in _front_ of
> a
> > web
> > server??  Sounds nice anyway.  :)
> 
> They're intelligent switches. The ones we use are strictly layer 4
> meaning we can perform intelligent actions based on source IP, source
> port, dest IP, dest port and protocol (TCP/UDP). There are others that
> look at layer 7 meaning I could redirect to different machines based on
> actual content in the request like a cookie for example. We've used
> Alteon (now Nortel) and Foundry switches for years for this purpose (and
> others).  They really do make load balancing a breeze and can work with
> high traffic loads. We're currently load balancing >4000 HTTP
> requests/sec and ~180 mbit/sec through one of them (not SM ;) ). We also
> use them for SMTP, POP and IMAP load balancing. This might sound like a
> sales pitch but it's not. ;) It looks like you can do some of the same
> things with LVS which didn't exist when we started our projects.
>  
> > > As far as using Perdition, it wasn't really designed to be a load
> > > balancer, at least when I last used it and wouldn't really be
> effective
> > > at it. Your load balancing would be determined by WHO was logging in
> at
> > > a particular time instead of how loaded a machine was. If all the
> users
> > > assigned to server 1 were logged in an none assigned to server 2
> you'd
> > > have one box loaded and one completely idle. I would suggest that if
> you
> > 
> > Wow, OK, thanks for clarifying.  Hadn't really read up on it yet, but
> will
> > certainly do so given what you say here.
> 
> Sure. Perdition is _extremely_ useful for those who need its
> functionality. We wouldn't have been able to easily move 36,000 email
> accounts from an old VMS machine to our current email system without it.
> Using perdition, none of the users had to change any of their mail
> server settings as everything 'just worked'.
>  
> > > get to the point where DNS load balancing isn't sufficient for your
> > > needs you take the plunge and set up a Linux load balancer or
> purchase a
> > > hardware switch that'll do it for you. Life is much easier that way
> =)
> > > If you scale even further, separate your IMAP/SMTP/HTTP servers. If
> you
> > > do that, you can grow the specific service that's being utilized the
> > > most without having to rebuild all services for each machine. By
> that
> > > time you should be bringing in enough money that cost wouldn't be
> > > prohibitive.
> > 
> > Yeah, that's the first thing on our list once we take the next step,
> so
> > I'm
> > glad to hear someone reaffirm it.  Don't really like IMAP/SMTP/HTTP on
> the
> > same server but we're stuck there for now.  One possibility given the
> > other
> > response today is that maybe it's OK to run just one IMAP server on
> our
> > NFS
> > machine where the mail spool is.  Our front-end HTTP/SMTP servers
> would
> > reduce their load a bit, as long as we don't kill the NFS server....
> 
> I personally think you should stick with two of everything you can. If
> you have one IMAP server and it dies then your entire mail system is
> dead from your customers' perspective. It doesn't matter if SMTP and
> HTTP are working, they still can't get their mail. You're making them
> even more dependent on your mail system because if they're using SM as
> their primary e-mail client, the only way they can see any of their
> e-mail is if your system is up. With a desktop client using POP at least
> they could see historical e-mails. In a case like this, redundancy is
> the mantra. You don't want to appear to have unreliable services. It's
> also highly unlikely you'll kill your NFS server. NFS processing is
> almost entirely disk and bandwidth. Even with 36,000 accounts we barely
> push either. Not everyone logs in at the same time so we generally see
> 3-4 mbit/s peak with the average more like 500 kb/s.


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