Indexing and Load Balancing

Adrian Ursu

Posted on 22/11/2015 10:46:00

Hi Guys,

I have a solution that is load balanced on 2 servers.

Each server has it's own Application, a third server si hosting the Files folder.

Everything works except for the Indexing. We initially set it up with a single Files folder for both servers. We run into some problems with indexing and we decided to have separate Files folders and sync them. This resulted in a set of other problems when making changes to files or templates.

I want to revert to the single Files folder setup but I donlt have a solution for the indexing.
Although I have disabled scheduled tasks on the secondary server, it often happens that a locker file is generated in the index folder without triggering the indexing on the main server.

Are there any details on how to set this up in order to avoid these issues? I could only find the instructions for the general setup. ARR and stuff.

I am using 8.5.1.25 and there are no plans for an upgrade just yet.

Thanks,
Adrian

Replies

Imar Spaanjaars

Posted on 22/11/2015 21:45:57

Hi Adrian,

Here's what we have done for some of our NLB setups:

1. Give each server its own set of files
2. Sync the file system, but exlude some folders. We have a setup using DFS where you can easily exclude folders, In other, older, setups we use RoboCopy and added the excluded folders to the command line

3. For the indexer issue we wrote a simple module that executes a HTTP request against all connected nodes. Just execute a URL like

"http://localip/Admin/Public/IndexUpdateTask.ashx?Path=Products&FullUpdate=True

to update. Make sure you use the local IP as you don't want to go through the load balancer here.

We're still facing some issues with not all nodes getting updated when there's a content update but hoepfully that gets resolved soon.

Imar

Adrian Ursu

Posted on 22/11/2015 23:08:54

Thanks Imar,

Tried that but it's a nightmare to make changes and test them.
And since there is no easy way to implement staging/production scenarios, some changes are done directly on the production version.

We've managed to disable the task scheduler on the second server but with a rather low-tech method. We've renamed the file that is used for the scheduler :)

Not pretty but it does the job. At least for a while.

Do newer versions hadle this out of the box?

Imar Spaanjaars

Posted on 02/12/2015 10:42:56

>> Do newer versions hadle this out of the box?

Not for us, with a setup using DFS under Windows. We're still facing some issues with invalidating the cache on all nodes.

Imar

Adrian Ursu

Posted on 02/12/2015 11:19:04

Well, that's bad.
Especially when you ask the customer to pay extra for the Load Balancing functionality.

One would expect this would work outside of the box, without tweaks or hacks.

Imar Spaanjaars

Posted on 02/12/2015 11:51:50

AFAIK, it's being worked on so hopefully this gets resolved real soon.

Imar

Adrian Ursu

Posted on 02/12/2015 11:53:37

I could not be happier :)

I had a lot of issues with this and we only have one customer that uses it.

I can't imagine what would happen if we were to have more cases :)

You must be logged in to post in the forum

Developer forum

Indexing and Load Balancing

Replies