Static Content Challenge

[awelch]

I have a growing website and am trying to figure out a better way to organize static content. Here is the current architecture

sub1.website.com/users/foo
sub1.website.com/users/bar
sub2.website.com/users/adam
sub3.website.com/users/cindy

and so on. Each Subdomain sits on a different server. I am looking to bring all the staic content onto a large disk array(s) and front end it with many webservers. Everything is directory based now, and it needs to remain that way.

Going forward I want the url to be something like this, but the existing urls need to work until people update their bookmarks.
website.com/foo
website.com/adam

I have looked at mod_rewrite and mod_proxy, but am not sure if that is the best solution. I was also concerned about how php sessions will work when doing this. In my opinion this must be solved all over the place with universities having user home directories, and email sites like yahoo or something. Any thoughts???

[jstarkey]

That is a tough one, but one you'd think is pretty popular -- I've never heard of it.

I did a quick google and didn't really find any answers. As a quick fix, for now, I'd say you could run a bash script that will create symlinks in doc root, with the second machine (the link targets) being mounted NFS.

NFS is slow, so this isn't the most optimal way to do it. May buy you some time though.

If you can use ~ in the user names, you can probablyucome up with a regexp that will cover it in user directory directive.

BTW, greetings from Evergreen 🙂