Content Delivery load balancing
Implement load balancing on different servers pointing to the same database, or to multiple databases.
If the load on your Web site machine is getting too heavy, you may want to consider copying the Web site to multiple machines and directing Web site visitors to the machine that is least busy. This is known as load balancing. There are two ways in which you can accomplish load balancing:
- SDL Tridion publishes the content to one Presentation Server and one Presentation Server database, and you create copies of the Web site on different machines. All content now comes from one database. This approach works best if at least one of the following applies:
- you have a powerful and fast database server
- your Web site is largely static and rarely needs to access the content database
- SDL Tridion publishes the content to multiple Presentation Servers. Each Presentation Server has its own content database and its own Web Application Server. This approach works best if your site is dynamic and puts a heavy load on your database.
Scenario 1 does not require you to perform any additional tasks. Your content authors publish to one Target Type that contains one Publication Target. You then implement the copying of the published Web site from that machine to your other machines, and implement the load balancing between those machines.
To implement scenario 2, create one Publication Target that publishes to multiple machines and put it in one Target Type. Publishing content now means that the content is published to multiple machines. In this case, you only need to implement load balancing as SDL Tridion performs the replication for you.
Note that load balancing does require you to synchronize the various caches on the various machines. Use the Cache Channel Service to synchronize those caches.