[Treebase-devel] load balancing downloads

[Mattison W. <mat...@ne...>]

Hi all.

During some recent testing by the Open Tree of Life folks, I was
reminded that the Treebase site can stop responding if it gets many
rapid requests to download files in nexml format and, to a lesser
extent, in the other formats.  I realized that it would take a trivial
amount of effort to load balance the Tomcat download processing to
some idle servers we have available.  All other requests except
downloads would still be served by the current web server.  This
avoids having to worry about session persistance and file uploads.  Of
course, this does not speed up downloads of files in any format, but
it does give us a pipeline so the site can handle several concurrent
downloads without locking up.

I have this set up now (and caching turned off for testing) on
treebase-dev.nescent.org.   Hilmar has approved using the idle systems
for load balancing.  Unless someone objects, I would like to enable
this load balancing of file downloads on the production site at
treebase.org on Thursday morning.

Regards,

Mattison