CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqlapachecentosmariadb
MarkWilkins
MarkWilkins

Reputation: 3

Apache (PHP) & Mysql - Ideal 2 Server Setup

My client currently has only one server with both MySql and Apache running on it, and at busy times of the year they're occasionally seeing Apache fall over as it has so many connections.

They run two applications; their busy public ecommerce PHP based website and their (busy during working hours only) internal order processing type application with 15-20 concurrent users.

I've managed to get them to increase their budget enough to get two servers. I'm considering either: A) one server running Apache/PHP and the other as a dedicated MySQL server, or B) one running their public website only, and the other running MySQL and the internal application.

The benefit I see of A) is that Mysql my.cnf can be tuned to use all of the resources of that server, but it has the drawback of only having one Apache instance running.

B) would spread the load on Apache across both servers, but would limit MySQL's resources on that server, even out of working hours when the internal application won't be used.

I just can't decide which way to go with this and would be grateful of any feedback you may have.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 60

Answers (1)

symcbean
symcbean

Reputation: 48387

Both approaches are wrong.

You have 2 goals here; availability and performance (I'm considering capacity to be an aspect of performance in this context).

To improve availability, you should be ensuring that there is no single point of failure in your architecture. But with the models you propose, you're actually creating multiple single points of failure - hence your 2 server models are less available than your single server.

From a performance point of view, you want to spread the workload across the available resources. You can't move CPU and memory between the servers but you can move the traffic.

Hence the optimal solution is to run both applications on both servers. Setting up MySQL clustering is a bit more complex, but probably the out-of-the-box asynch replication will be adequate - with the nodes configured as master-master (but writes from the 2 applications targeted sensibly).

There's probably a lot of scope for increasing the capacity of the system further but without a lot more detail (more than is appropriate in this forum, and possibly more than your client is comfortable payng for) it is hard to advise.

Upvotes: 1

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