[thelist] New Server Configuration

[Hershel Robinson]

> Serving 2000 simultaneous DB connections will kick 32-bit MySQL in the 
> teeth.  However, the actual number of simultaneous connections can be 
> managed to a much lower number with proper app design.  In particular, 
> you need to pay carefull attention to connection pooling and/or 
> persistent connections.  It is also important for each web script to 
> perform all business logic DB requests, release the DB connection, then 
> perform all output formatting.  Model-View-Controller frameworks help 
> with this, but you can do it by hand if necessary.

We are indeed using the CakePHP MVC platform for PHP.

> One other consideration:  if you implement security for the 2200+ users 
> via database permissions, you won't be able pool the connections.  If 
> you roll your own security so only a single database login is required 
> for the app, all connections can all be pooled.  Then, the number of 
> connections required will follow the page hit rate, not the number of 
> sessions.

CakePHP by default uses a static DB connection string and we have no 
plans to alter that. I do not know how Cake connects by MySQL by 
default, but I imagine we could alter that if necessary to use a 
persistant connection. Is this what you are suggesting?

> Apache creates numerous child processes to handle requests, each of 
> which gets a 3GB address space.  You shouldn't have any problems there, 
> other than adjusting the corresponding config settings to allow enough. 

We plan to use Apache 2.x.

> If you can generate some numbers on page hits per minuter per user, and 
> typical page execution times, the performance requirements will be more 
> clear.

OK, we will investigate what we are seeing presently on the live system.

Thank you,
Hershel

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