Load balancing

[modex]

I have a high traffic website that has almost outgrown a dedicated (dual xeon 2.0, 2gb ram, 2x73gb 10k scsi) server and have began implementing a new set of servers to handle the load. The servers are placed behind dual Foundry ServerIron switches in Active/Standby mode with SLB enabled. The problem I am having is that even though the session itself is stored in the database (according to OSCommerce's method of doing so, whatever that may be-I haven't dug into the code), the sessions are not sticking across nodes. When a single node is enabled, everything works fine, but when more than one node is enabled, the shopping carts, etc, are lost between the different servers.

 

If anybody has any experience using OSCommerce in this kind of configuration, or any load balanced configuration, I would like to know what you have come up with.

 

I'm currently testing 'sticky-age 60', but the second switch (same model, different OS version) doesn't support this so I'll have to do a firmware update on it to implement it... But would like a fully database based solution rather than relying on a timeout.

[♥Vger]

I can't advise about your new setup - but I would have thought that rather than multiple servers in a cluster it would have been better to go for one big box e.g. x2 quadcore chips with x2 250Gb hard drives running Raid 1 and 8 Gb of RAM. It would have to be a very very big, very very active site indeed to need more than that.

 

Vger