[ic] Running IC Under Heavy Load

[Bryan Gmyrek]

>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm starting a new project and will have something like a database  
>>> with
>>> a million 'products' or more and at least a million unique visitors  
>>> (so
>>
>> No, you will need a server cluster. I know of no dynamic application
>> will handle that type of load on a single machine when querying a
>> million- item database.
>>
> This sounds like 2 or 3 clusters of machines to me.  On large sites,  
> we use a
> pair of apache servers for reverse proxy and static content that are  
> front
> ends to a pair of application servers and possibly a pair of database  
> servers.
>
Thanks for the advice.

> Another technique I've seen people use is to generate all the pages  
> statically
> with an external script at some fixed interval.  In any case, you need  
> to
> reduce the number of "expensive" operations done on your site.
>
Hi, yes this is a good idea ... I actually do this with my current site  
and serve the cached pages to se spiders.

> You might be interested in looking at
> http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/apps/scale_etoys/ 
> etoys.html#Load_Balancing_and_Failover
> and
> http://perl.apache.org/outstanding/success_stories/index.html
>
> In any case, the amount of tuning to the OS, apache and IC is not  
> trivial.
>
> Based on your numbers, you are looking at 12 new sessions a second and  
> 120
> page views a second.  How could you consider this volume without any  
> type of
> redundancy?  Hard drives, NICs and power supplies do fail.  How long  
> can you

Well... I never said I wouldn't have redundancy.  Just asking the  
question the way it was posed to me by my partner....  I think we knew  
we'd need a server cluster but were just wondering what the  
capabilities of ic are for heavy load sites.  One alternative we're  
considering is just using mod_perl and writing simple templates and  
scripts for speed since we don't need the login/admin/cart features of  
IC.

> live without your site being up?  How do you plan to roll out changes  
> and
> upgrades?
>

Thanks very much again for the comments,
Bryan