Uploads with multiple servers

snapbackz

What's the logic behind doing this? Say "Server A" is used for web traffic. "Server B" would handle uploads but how can you upload from one server to another? I have my users accounts and stuff on "Server A" so I dont want to POST to another server and log them out. I was thinking of NFS but i hear that could be very CPU itensive as well.

So bascially, whats the logic behind upload FROM "Server A" to "Server B" without leaving "Server A"?

I'm terrible at explaining :-P Hopefully someone understand meh.

Horizon88

What I think you're trying to do is something like having a user fill out a regular web form, with an upload field, but instead of storing the user's uploaded file on Server A, have it saved on Server B? If that's the case, you could use temp files on Server A, and then FTP them using PHP's in-built FTP functions to kick them to server B and delete them from A, all in the same file to handle the POST form.

Anywhere along those lines?

MarkR

There are lots of options - you need to consider them all in the context of:
- Reliability
- Performance
- Maintainability
- Supportability
- Security
- etc

You need to be able to replicate this two-server setup in your development environment (for each of your developers, test engineers etc). Your operations staff need documentation to understand it to be able to support the server configuration.

Yes, you could use NFS. You could use a third server to store the data. You could use an appliance. You could store the data locally and have a process which "rsync"s it to the other server. Each solution has its merits- make a list of all possible approaches you can think of and their benefits / costs.

Mark

snapbackz

Thanks for the advice guys.

@: Yes, i want to store the file on another server but I also want the upload process itself to happen on another server. I dont want any of the uploads to use Server A (general traffic server) resources.

@: I dont really have a team behind me to do that. My site gets around 120k unique visitors per day. Uploads is far from the primary use of my site for the users but when i used the web traffic server to handle uploads for things like avatars and pictures it bogged the server down.

So i guess im just wondering if you can upload a file from Server A to Server B without using any of Server A's resources or CPU.

Horizon88

You could set up a low-resource http server on Server B (see lighttpd, I think) and pass users transparently to the upload page on Server B, perhaps.