Website Madness - Feb 2
Load balancing?
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
We experience a problem this weekend with broken images on WinCustomize to the skins in the library. For some reason images from skins4.wincustomize.com were not loading. Though I do not know why this problem occured my best guess is that the machine is simply getting over loaded. During peak traffic hours the machine that hosts WinCustomize will peg at 100% CPU usage and pretty much stay that way for a couple of hours. Also, with previous server issues we have moved skins4.wincustomize.com to run off the same machine. So not only was the ASP scripts for WinCustomize causing the CPU to max out, we were also hitting the drive extremely hard as we were using it as a file server.
The two of these issues together is really just too much for that machine. So the quick fix was to move skins4 off of that machine over the weekend. We need to get another fileserver in place so I can redistribute the pain. It also would help if I had multiple drive units in each server so in cases like this I can have asp scripts on one physical drive and images on another.
Today I implemented my own form of Load Balancing for WinCustomize. I setup a secondary server for WinCustomize (www2.wincustomize.com), which only has just enough scripts to support the library. When the main server for WinCustomize starts getting at a critical load I start forwarding people over to www2 while they are browsing the skin library. This instally help reduce the CPU usage on WinCustomize.
For the load balancing, I primarily am only forwarding users who are not logged on or who are non paying users. It's really amazing at how much of our traffic is caused by this group. When it comes time to creating WinCust 4 I think we are really going to need to look at ways of limiting non paying users or putting in measures to intice them to purchase something.
Also spent some time upgrading some of our scripts to include better security for sending email. While doing this I also stumbled across a very poor function script that emails your serial numbers to you. This script was running out of our local office so I moved it to our main servers in CA and that increased it's speed 10 fold.
Maybe one of these days when I can get these servers to settle down I will be able to do some new development myself.
The two of these issues together is really just too much for that machine. So the quick fix was to move skins4 off of that machine over the weekend. We need to get another fileserver in place so I can redistribute the pain. It also would help if I had multiple drive units in each server so in cases like this I can have asp scripts on one physical drive and images on another.
Today I implemented my own form of Load Balancing for WinCustomize. I setup a secondary server for WinCustomize (www2.wincustomize.com), which only has just enough scripts to support the library. When the main server for WinCustomize starts getting at a critical load I start forwarding people over to www2 while they are browsing the skin library. This instally help reduce the CPU usage on WinCustomize.
For the load balancing, I primarily am only forwarding users who are not logged on or who are non paying users. It's really amazing at how much of our traffic is caused by this group. When it comes time to creating WinCust 4 I think we are really going to need to look at ways of limiting non paying users or putting in measures to intice them to purchase something.
Also spent some time upgrading some of our scripts to include better security for sending email. While doing this I also stumbled across a very poor function script that emails your serial numbers to you. This script was running out of our local office so I moved it to our main servers in CA and that increased it's speed 10 fold.
Maybe one of these days when I can get these servers to settle down I will be able to do some new development myself.