Load Balancing

[mtrujillo86]

Ablecommerce used to have instructions for how and what folders to sync when load balancing your system.

Does anyone have information regarding this?

I'd like to know which folders need to be mirrored as well as how.

[david-ebt]

Here's a link in the Able help site:

http://help.ablecommerce.com/installati ... system.htm

[mtrujillo86]

That link is for installing it on a load balanced system, but it has no details on how to keep your app_data, app_themes, web chart folder, etc.... in sync across all servers. Does ablecommerce automatically do this for you? If you upload an image for a product or theme, how does this image get replicated across all servers in the server farm?

I'm currently reading up on RoboCopy, DFS and WFF. Does anyone have any experience with ablecommerce and these file syncing systems? We are using AAR to route requests.

[david-ebt]

I don't believe the AbleCommerce enterprise system automatically syncs up the files between the servers in the server farm.

Since the admin site is part of the same site as the user site, it will also be load balanced unless you can set up some special routing of the admin subsite. This means your admin updates could be happening on any of your servers.
DFS or WFF can probably handle the task but I don't know how to set those up. RoboCopy and a scheduled task will accomplish the job. RoboCopy can mirror based on date time stamp so it can pick up the latest changes from either server. If you have more than two web servers the RoboCopy script will be a lot more complicated because of the combination of servers.

When you set up the scheduled task to run the RoboCopy batch file, you have to decide how frequently you need to check for updates versus how long you can allow the servers to be out of sync. Note that the scheduled task needs to run as a user with privileges to write to all servers.

The folders you need to sync are (depending on the features you use). This list assumes you're manually syncing code changes.

• app_data\scriptlets
  app_themes\your_theme
  assets
  images
  emailtemplates
  digitalgoods

An example RoboCopy script to update the Scriptlets folder would be:

Code: Select all

REM Copy Updated Scriptlets
echo Starting Scriptlets > d:\robocopy_logs\mysite_out.log
echo Starting Scriptlets > d:\robocopy_logs\mysite_in.log
robocopy "d:\mysite\app_data\scriptlets" "\\10.10.10.10\d$\mysite\app_data\scriptlets" /NJH /NJS /NJS /E /XO /COPY:DATSO /R:0 /NP /NDL /LOG+:"d:\robocopy_logs\mysite_out.log" /XF thumbs.db
robocopy "\\10.10.10.10\d$\mysite\app_data\scriptlets" "d:\mysite\app_data\scriptlets" /NJH /NJS /E /XO /COPY:DATSO /R:0 /NP /NDL /LOG+:"d:\robocopy_logs\mysite_in.log" /XF thumbs.db

This script runs from one "master" server and would push out and pull in changes from a second server. There would be additional syntax for the other folders.

[mtrujillo86]

We are currently trying to use WFF & ARR. We think we can have WFF work exactly like your robocopy example below. I'll have to come back and update this and let you know if/how we got it to work.

Thanks for including the directory information, this is something that is missing from their documentation.

If we can't get WFF to work, i'm definitely going to RoboCopy since it seems to be widely used by ablecommerce customers.

We have an appliance which will be used for ARR. Then 3 web servers with ablecommerce residing on them. We will use one of the servers as the primary WFF server.