Load Balancing Processwire

[alxndre]

Hello PW lovers!

I'd like to ask something that I haven't seen discussed much around here.

We're currently at the early stages of planning a buy and sell site. I have been using processwire for more than a year, and I have always been impressed (and thankful) at the ease and speed that it lets you roll things out the door. This is the primary reason that processwire is on top of our list.

We are projecting (hoping) that the site will get lots of hits, and it's nature is very image intensive. While i know for certain that processwire scales very well, I can't help but worry that in time, it would not hold.

So what I really what to know is if anyone ever tried to run processwire on one server, with its database on another server and possibly multiple database servers with load balancing. If not, how hard would it be to accomplish this?

We're not afraid to put in a lot of effort to get this working as this is a long term project. Any insight about this would be greatly appreciated, as always.

Thank you. Oh, and congrats on Bitnami win! Processwire really deserved that!

[adrian]

From what Ryan posted here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/5335-another-villas-site/?p=51628

this site involves 1 PW installation for managing the inventory, and another PW installation for presenting it, and they use web services to chat back and forth all day.

 

 

it sounds like he went down that track a little with his latest villas site.

[pwired]

Using nginx might also help, one of it's features is Load balancing with in-band health checks.

[netcarver]

MySQL clients work fine with remote MySQL servers so it is possible to have the two on different machines: it will work. What isn't so obvious is the way that MySQL handles DB replication and failover for high availability (which it sounds like you might want to do.) It's not a simple subject so I'll not go into it here but seeing as you aren't afraid to do your research, I'd recommend taking a look at "High Performance MySQL" (at least the 3rd edition) which really covers replication as well as performance. I think you'll find that the new edition (I've only got the second) also touches on sharding for load balancing - something that you might have to do manually in MySQL unlike some other high availability DBs.)

If any of the data you are going to be storing involves financial transactions (say placing orders) then I'd also recommend looking at storing it in InnoDB tables rather than (what was) PWs default MyISAM tables. It is possible to get PW running on InnoDB tables in MySQL, I've done it myself though I haven't posted a how-to about it yet.

[ryan]

Another option is that you could go for one of the scalable cloud hosting services (for example), letting the hosting side scale as you need it.