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How many servers currently supporting your forum?

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How many servers currently supporting your forum?
Do you load balance? how does this software scales? can you give us a quick and dirty explanation on how would this forums software support ultra high traffic sites?

Thanks,
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Re: [jaltuve] How many servers currently supporting your forum? In reply to
Hi,

By "your forum" do you mean this support forum? If so, then it's running on a single server (along with all the other applications and demos used in Gossamer Threads). It's one of our Plan B dedicated servers we offer - a dual 1.2 ghz machine with 1 gig of ram.

There is a large number of ways you can scale depending on your needs and your budget. For most sites (say 200 to 300 concurrent online users), a single server will do. I would recommend running mod_perl with a dual apache setup, and use some sort of frontend compression like mod_gzip.

For very large scale sites, you can split things up into multiple servers:

Application server - a mod_perl enabled server
Database server - a server to host mysql
Content server - handles all the requests from the clients, and proxies requests to the forum to the application server.

Let me know if this helps, or if you have any other questions,

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] How many servers currently supporting your forum? In reply to
We're not an ultra-high-volume forum site (yet!), but since we have a server farm anyway, we threw GF onto it:

We have the GF scripts and templates on four Apache servers behind a load-balancing switch and a replicator (which takes care of moving changed templates and modules around). They talk to MySQL on a dedicated database server (eventually, we'll get around to changing that over to a pair of Oracle databases). No mod_perl yet. So far, so good!
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Re: [agaffin] How many servers currently supporting your forum? In reply to
Thanks guys.

Agaffin, by replicator you mean rsync? what approach you used to solve the templates/modules problem? I was thinking on using rsync on a master, replicating changes to the other servers and removing admin.cgi from all the front end machines to make sure there one single point for modifications.

Alex, question for you: The license agreement says that Gossamer Products can not be resold, so, if I work as a independent contractor do I need to buy the licenses on behalf of the company i'm installing Links SQL for? I would like to charge for template customization and apply a little markup to the price, but apparently your licencing does not allows it.
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Re: [jaltuve] How many servers currently supporting your forum? In reply to
Quote:
Alex, question for you: The license agreement says that Gossamer Products can not be resold, so, if I work as a independent contractor do I need to buy the licenses on behalf of the company i'm installing Links SQL for? I would like to charge for template customization and apply a little markup to the price, but apparently your licencing does not allows it.

We have a reseller program available where we can give you discounts depending on the volume of software you sell. Contact Jack at jack@gossamer-threads.com for more info.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [jaltuve] How many servers currently supporting your forum? In reply to
In Reply To:
Agaffin, by replicator you mean rsync? what approach you used to solve the templates/modules problem? I was thinking on using rsync on a master, replicating changes to the other servers and removing admin.cgi from all the front end machines to make sure there one single point for modifications.

Same basic idea, but we use some Inktomi replicator (hmm, I wonder if you can even buy it anymore, now that Inktomi's gone back to being just a search engine?). The replicator always moves stuff from server A to B, C, D, etc., so I make sure to just touch GF files on that server (basically by going to its specific IP number, rather than to our general domain name). Then, within five minutes (yep, we have the replicator set on a five-minute cycle), the changed files are all over the server farm.