Running Shopsite in a Load Balanced Environment

[Blake Johnosn]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has tried to run Shopsite in a load balanced
environment? If so would you be willing to share any tips, or issues you
may have run into?

Thanks,

Blake

[Rob]

I do not have specific experience with ShopSite and load balancing, but a
few thoughts that might help...

- If you treat the ShopSite software as you would a database such as MySQL,
this will help understand what's involved. The heart of the ShopSite data is
stored in a SQLite db file, so if you plan on having the cart portion on
separate servers behind a load balancer, you'll have some issues to tackle
with replication and synching the db.

- ShopSite also stores data files for customer carts, etc... in various
"data" directories, so you'll have to synch these as well if it's being
distributed across multiple servers. You'll also have to make sure cookies
pass through as these are used by ShopSite if available.

- You may want to consider having the ShopSite cart itself on only one
machine behind the load balancer, and put the rest of the site across
multiple servers for ease of administration. Similar to having a central DB
server and multiple web servers behind a load balancer.

Rob

"Blake Johnosn" <bjohnson@singleedgedevelopment.com> wrote in message
news:e93jms$9g$1@eval.shopsite.com...

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has tried to run Shopsite in a load balanced
environment? If so would you be willing to share any tips, or issues you
may have run into?

Thanks,

Blake

[Heath]

We tried it on one of our servers and had very bad experiences. I have been
on 3 different servers so far due to the memory usage of shopsite. It has
decreased some since 8.1 though. If you do not have that many products
though you should not have a problem. My site has 10,000 products so
whenever I regenerate it would kill the server.


"Rob" <rob@lexiconn.com> wrote in message
news:e94h1f$f1v$1@eval.shopsite.com...

I do not have specific experience with ShopSite and load balancing, but a
few thoughts that might help...

- If you treat the ShopSite software as you would a database such as
MySQL, this will help understand what's involved. The heart of the
ShopSite data is stored in a SQLite db file, so if you plan on having the
cart portion on separate servers behind a load balancer, you'll have some
issues to tackle with replication and synching the db.

- ShopSite also stores data files for customer carts, etc... in various
"data" directories, so you'll have to synch these as well if it's being
distributed across multiple servers. You'll also have to make sure cookies
pass through as these are used by ShopSite if available.

- You may want to consider having the ShopSite cart itself on only one
machine behind the load balancer, and put the rest of the site across
multiple servers for ease of administration. Similar to having a central
DB server and multiple web servers behind a load balancer.

Rob

"Blake Johnosn" <bjohnson@singleedgedevelopment.com> wrote in message
news:e93jms$9g$1@eval.shopsite.com...
Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has tried to run Shopsite in a load balanced
environment? If so would you be willing to share any tips, or issues you
may have run into?

Thanks,

Blake

[Blake Johnson]

Rob, thank you for your tips. I was thinking the same thing about
treating SS like a central db that each load balanced web server feeds
into during an add to cart event.

Thanks,

--Blake

Rob wrote:

I do not have specific experience with ShopSite and load balancing, but a
few thoughts that might help...

- If you treat the ShopSite software as you would a database such as MySQL,
this will help understand what's involved. The heart of the ShopSite data is
stored in a SQLite db file, so if you plan on having the cart portion on
separate servers behind a load balancer, you'll have some issues to tackle
with replication and synching the db.

- ShopSite also stores data files for customer carts, etc... in various
"data" directories, so you'll have to synch these as well if it's being
distributed across multiple servers. You'll also have to make sure cookies
pass through as these are used by ShopSite if available.

- You may want to consider having the ShopSite cart itself on only one
machine behind the load balancer, and put the rest of the site across
multiple servers for ease of administration. Similar to having a central DB
server and multiple web servers behind a load balancer.

Rob

"Blake Johnosn" <bjohnson@singleedgedevelopment.com> wrote in message
news:e93jms$9g$1@eval.shopsite.com...
Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has tried to run Shopsite in a load balanced
environment? If so would you be willing to share any tips, or issues you
may have run into?

Thanks,

Blake