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Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 3:35 pm
by Chris Corbyn
nickman013 wrote:Oh Thats cool. Thanks for the info. I am guessing all webhosts have clusters.
Some will, some wont. Many of them will just have many servers running separately all with unique RIPE addresses (external IP addresses). Then when they fill one server too much they'll start adding accounts on a new server with a new IP.

An example of somewhere clustering is used would be google. I dread to think how many servers google has but I can guarantee they'll be running a huge cluster. The project I'm employed on uses a cluster of MySQl/Linux servers too since we're serving data to a lot of schools and get literally hammered with requests during the day. Setting the cluster up was one of the first things I worked on when I started that job before I ever started writing code :P

You can also set something up called LVS that sits at the gateway to your cluster. The LVS is a server which acts as a load balancer. If a server is already busy dealing with a request the LVS will look for another one and pass the request over to that. The implication being, if you only have one LVS and it goes down nobody will be able to connect :oops:

A common practise with DNS is also something called "Round Robin" which basic cycles connections around multiple servers rather than just the one... it's just another way of bringing the load down on a network :)

As you can tell by my rambling... there's a lot of options and a lot of useful things you can do with clusters :D

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:00 pm
by RobertPaul
agtlewis wrote:What in the world is that?
A fire hazard. 8O

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:45 pm
by Benjamin
LOL, I believe you are correct.

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 7:39 pm
by nickman013
thanks for the info d11wtq..

HAHA robert paul!

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 8:18 pm
by josh
I gave the link to nickman as a joke
RobertPaul wrote:A fire hazard. 8O
It's actually probably no less of a fire hazard then having them in a case, infact they would run cooler this way. The only way I would see a PC catching on fire is if water was introduced to a PSU.. even then it would most likely just short itself out.