Multiple Machine enviroment

crimson

I'm interested in finding out the scalability of this forum software, How does it scale across multiple machines? I'm not really concerneed with DB backend (mysql clusters are rather easy to setup), But with Vanilla on the frontend. Can they share 1 DB backend? How does Vanilla handle sessions, If you go from Machine 1, and are bounced over to machine 8 cause of the Loadbalancer will it gracefully pick up and carry on, or will Vanilla prompt the user with a login box, or a permision denied to post (cause you were in the middle of a post when you bounced for example).

iambigred

Hi I use Vanilla hosted on the main university server where I study, which consists of god knows how many servers. It generally doesn't like sessions. When using the Wordpress admin interface for example it asks you to login constantly between pages if the load balancer decides that your request is going to be issued from a different server in the cluster. Luckily they offer a subdomain, www-same.dur.ac.uk which provides a single server from the cluster which therefore ensures sessions are carried across from page to page, which solves any session problems. I'm assuming Vanilla will have the same issues as Wordpress. I notice that if I'm logged in on www-same. domain, then visit the www. domain then I'm logged out. This is all using the same single mySQL server, although there is probably some sort of clever mirroring system in place to ensure they have backups. It used to be the case that the DB server was taken down for 10-15 minutes each day for backup, although much more of the entire university website relies upon the mySQL server, so it wasn't really practical to do so any more. It possibly also depends upon your load balancer/cluster configuration, although I don't know much about that. I'm sure there must be a way to carry sessions across multiple machines in such a situation. Hope this helps, Alex

caironoleto

In this configuration you receive ErrPostBackKeyInvalid?

karladidas

Hi,

I am using vanilla on multiple servers in a load balanced cluster. When creating a discussion, posting a comment or editing, I am getting the "Some problems were encountered. There was a problem authenticating your post information" error.

This happens on a random basis on the live cluster and did not happen at all on the development server. So I am thinking this is due to the on-machine sessions not being available on subsequent page loads.

Is there a configuration setting to use DB based sessions or have all data stored in the cookies rather than machine sessions?

Tim

Vanilla2 uses 100% cookie-based sessions, but this feature was not backported to Vanilla1.

karladidas

@Tim thanks for your reply. I will keep an eye on the development of Vanilla2.

mike_evans

I'm looking to assess if Vanilla 2 will work properly across multiple servers. I'm aware of the cookie-based sessions, but what I am worried about is that many changes made to configuration via the Dashboard are written to the local config.php file, rather than to a shared database. Is there a strategy that anyone is effectively using to make sure config changes get shared correctly across multiple servers?

Linc

I would treat the config file like any file that needs to get pushed live. The config file theoretically shouldn't change any more often then you'd be pushing out version updates or tested changes.

mike_evans

Am I correct in assuming that the only dashboard functions that write directly to config.php are the plugin and application settings? And that all other dashboard features write to the DB?

zodiacdm

Ah, not exactly. There is a decent bit of settings that go into the config.php...

Basically anything that is a board setting and not a user setting.

This would not really be a problem if your site is ready for deployment, (and you won't be configuring it often) though.