Sites – load balancing best practices

The answer to your question is, “it depends”. 🙂 There is some evidence that suggests that using many smaller servers instead of one big server can be better for performance, although obviously harder to manage. This especially makes sense in a Virtual Machine environment.

Seconding Max – it depends.

If your server is big enough and your I/O is fast enough then you could come out OK.

Using multiple sites does spread your work over the server resources including getting a different Recover/Error DB per site. depending on how you architect your sites, you can end up spreading out your workload considerably on the singlle server.

I hope someone at TriCore is doing some sort of capacity/performance analysis to determine the current consumption and doing some sort of projection based on a queuing methodology. That should give you a better answer.

Here at MDACC we run many sites (I don’t have the exact number but could be in the hundreds) with a last measured daily volume of approximately 6-7 milllion messages per peak day. We are more than capable of keeping to our intended Service Levels.

We are anticipating an inclrease of both the volume and size of messages and the number of sites are expanding.

I have not heard we are planning to add servers but we may expand the server we have to serve that anticipated load.

Don’t forget to work with your System Admins in order to allow them to know what is going on.  If you put everything on a single disk then you might run into issues in the future but that all depends on the hardware you have and what it can be upgraded to.  

We are planning on building a very large VM environment.  Right now I know of at least 50 sites that will be on that system and there will be more.  I plan on splitting up my site across multiple disks to not put a large load on a single disk drive.  Again this all comes down to your hardware.

Rob

By the way, there is no built-in cap on the number of sites to my knowledge. Each site runs independently from the other sites. The limits will be on the hardware resources.