Distributive Computing for hosting?
 

I guess I will start things off here. :)

I manage a forum with that poses some unique issues. The big issue it that they are really busy only about 2 days each week. It is based around a current television show so 5 days a week it is a relatively quite place with 200-300 users online. Then, on the same day and time each week (when the show airs) like clockwork, they get pummeled and get hit with 1200-1500+ users online. This peak usually maintains for at least 36-48 hours.

Now we have them on a single server, Dual Operteron 246's, 4GB RAM, SCSI drive. We push the envelope of that poor machine and turn off showing logged in users and full DB read marking during peak times.

My server provider has mentioned they are testing a distributed computing system that will allow us to use a second server's resources during our peak times, but when we don't need the extra juice, someone else would be using it. I am interested since we really don't need a second server at all 75% of the time and I hate to have to have my client paying for a second server when they only need if for 48 hours or so out of the week so we are interested as a possible solution to help limit costs.

Has anyone had any experience with this type of setup? Is it new in the server market?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Did your host give you a link to the description of what he plans to use?

Not yet. I use LiquidWeb for that server and durning our weekly "damn the server is getting killed, please restart apache because I can't even get into CPanel" talks they mentioned they are in the final phases of testing the system. They claim they could be ready by the end of the month.

There are some techniques that could fall under this category, advanced load balancing or GRID computing.

Would need more info to comment on it.

I find it curious that you seem to suffer with only 1200 or so users online - we have a dedicated server that only has 2GB RAM and a single HT Xeon. We had a burst during the week that saw over 1000 users/guests online and it barely flickered.

You will be better off running the database and web servers on separate machines, likely connected via gigabit ethernet or something faster. Distributed computing is more meant for sharing CPU load for intense calculations whereas most web applications simply need fast RAM, storage, etc.

So i've read alot about people moving their large vB forums to dual machine setups, one for the DB and one for the webserver.

My question is HOW does one go about setting this up ? I'm no fool, but I just don't understand how you tell vbulletin to look for its database material on a different computer.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree and is this something only a host can setup for me ? (I like to do most of this admin/setup stuff myself instead of relying on my host)

If anyone can point me to a good thread or site that might describe this more to me it would be mucho appreciated!

You set the location in your config.php. Normally it will say "localhost" - you change this to the url (or ip address) of the database machine.

I see, ok this makes sense, thanks for the reply!

Is it as simple as plugging in an IP or Url in that config setting and then go?

thanks much !!

Mysql on the DB server will need to be running networking, this is often disabled when php and mysql are on the same box as it they will use a unix socket to talk to each other, not tcp/ip.