Multi Server Elgg Setup

By BandC

We have an Elgg website which runs on a single server (Web server and DB server on the same machine). We are looking into the possibility of separating the web server and the DB server by putting them on different servers. After we get that working, we may look into putting more web servers on the front end and eventually maybe add some more DB backends as a last step.

From our research, having a single separate web server and a single separate DB server is fairly straightforward. You put Apache, Elgg code and data on one server, MySQL on the other server, make sure the connection between them works, and you update the Elgg settings, right?

After that, if you were to add multiple web servers while keeping one separate DB server, where would you put the Elgg data folder? Elgg data folder normally resides where the Elgg code is on the web server but since there are multiple web servers, there would be multiple copies of the data folder so you would need to keep them in synch. Would you need to use some sort of fileshare or filesynch?

We saw some people saying they have this setup working here in this old thread:

https://elgg.org/discussion/view/2223983/web-server-clustering-for-elgg-based-sites

User Jerome Bakker says he has this setup working.

Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, how did you deal with the Elgg data folder?

If we have this working, we may eventually look into having multiple DB server backends too but that may be a bit too ambitious given Elgg's DB structure.

We would love to hear if anyone has any experience or ideas on making multi web server + multi DB server set up work.

Thanks.

 

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