filepro and multiple servers

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:53:28PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 04:24:45PM -0500, Richard D. Williams may or may
> not have proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> > Has anyone used multiple servers in combination with a single large data
> > server with filepro?
> 
> Yes, but not in a configuration I'd recommend.  The architecture was not my
> recommendation, though.
> 
> > A general overview of what I am thinking:
> >
> > Filepro is installed on each of 4 servers (A,B,C,D) and via NFS, or some
> > other connectivity, the data is stored on server Z.  A proxy server is in
> > front of the 4 servers to do load balancing.  Each server has a 200 user
> > license.
> 
> fP over NFS works, but I wouldn't recommend it--especially for large files.
> Even with sync -off- (which is a calculated risk), say you have something
> that has to scan through an index, and the index is huge...  Here's a
> real-life example:
> 
> -rw------- 1 filepro 502 101963776 May 23 01:05 index.A
> 
> That's 100MB of index, and that's also only -one- index.  If something
> needs to read through the index for a report, that's automatically 100MB of
> data going over the network.  Actually more, since you have IP overhead,
> TCP overhead, and NFS overhead--even with 8K packet sizes.
> 
> NFS was never designed to be speedy.  Even on gigabit, I don't recommend it
> for the volumes you're talking about.  I can see this going very poorly
> from the start.

I came late to this; new job is killing me, though it sure pays well...

This is *precisely* why SQL -- and client-server database computing --
was invented in the first place.

Anything that involves file-based-DBMS on one side of network wire,
data files on the other, is almost guaranteed to suck; don't do it.

No, really.  You'll hate yourself in the morning.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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