load balancing ...

[c1sc0]

Hi,

 

anyone got experience with load-balancing osCommerce? Either the php/apache side or the MySQL side. The reason why I'm considering porting our site to OSX/osCommerce in the first place is to be able to withstand more hits in the first place. Being able to 'plug-in' new machines later on would be neat. What about sessions?

 

Cheers - Cisco

[Jason]

I would be very interested in that too. We haven't put osCOmmerce behind our load balancer because we don't know if it will work (and don't have enough days before going live to test it) and because copying all the conent accross several servers would be a pain.

 

 

On that note:

Anyone out there know where I would find a mirroring script for apache?

 

Thanks

 

Jason

[schaub123]

I'm gonna try this in a day or two with oscommerce. It should work since the cookies are domain based and the sessions are stored in the database. We're going to use a simple round robin dns approach. If anybody's tried this or can give some pitfalls, please post. Thanks.

[driesie]

Have you tried it, and if so, did it work?

[bmbeaulieu]

I'm not sure how osC supports sessions/uses sessions. All of our web hosting is done behind load balancers for redundancy purposes.

 

One of our customers is using osC and is reporting problems with lost carts/shipping details.. we just adjusted our foundry load balancers to service this site in a weighted fashion vs. response time.

 

Basically all hits should go to 'web1' unless it isn't available. At that time all requests will to go 'web2'.. etc...

 

We're waiting to see if this fixes their issue.

 

If it does then we can assume PHP sessions are being used.. and we all know that PHP sessions are filesystem based.

 

I'm considering sharing the session directory across servers but I'm not sure if that'll work nicely.

 

In general we don't recommend load balancing PHP based sites. We always try to set them up with a weighted predictor instead of round-robin/response time/# of connections.