multiple servers to lessen load, what about members directory?
 

I know that using multiple servers to store static content such as Images and videos is a good practice to have a faster loading website, due to fewer http requests per server. But how do I go about doing this with a protected members directory
members.site.com/ holds all my member content... lets say i want to use two different servers though for the members section, how does a user login to
members.site.com and then end up downloading from the second server,
members1.site.com cause members1 is a different server than members, and their both protected, but how does a user login to both of them at the same time...?

What I have heard of most people doing along these lines is to put the Tours to the site. The hosted tools and anything that brings in traffic on one server. and then the members area on a seperate. That way all bandwidth is for the members area on one and the other takes care of people that have not yet paid.

Getting with a host about this would be the best Ideas as what one may be able to offer the others may not.

Hit me on ICQ and I will send you to two of the ones I know and they should be able to help you.

There are a lot of methods to have users logged in at the same time on both servers. For example in php you can do this with memcache or mysql session handling.

I strongly agree with doing as pornguy suggested, and as google, yahoo and other huge sites do.
You'll notice Yahoo separates their site into logical sections such as mail.yahoo.com,
groups.yahoo.com, news.yahoo.com, etc.

There are sections called adwords.google.com, news.google.com etc. There is no such
thing as graphics.google.com, scripts.google.com, or html.google.com. There are several
very good reasons for that. A site divided into logical sections like tour.site.com and
members.site.com is more reliable, maintainable, and secure than one splintered based
on file type, with html.site.com, gifs.site.com, and etc.

In short, to follow the lead of great companies like Google and Yahoo, make www.site.com
and members.site.com, NOT html.site.com, phpscript.site.com, and jpg.site.com.

Another reasonable split is implied by the names you see but never thing about.
You've seen server names like mail.site.com, www.site.com, ns1.site.com, and
www.site.com. That's reasonable to have different servers perform different services.
Having a database server is very common, seperate from the web server. That database
server could also be a mail server or a DNS server.

I should have also mentioned the FIRST thing you should do when considering any action
to reduce load. First, to avoid wasting time and money doing something stupid, UNDERSTAND
what your load is and where you bottlenecks are. It's not uncommon at all for people to double
the number of servers without reducing improving anything. They do that when they move all
of the disk load to one machine and all of the CPU load to another, instead of dividing the
disk load between different disks. The best way to create that kind of waste is to put videos,
which load the drives, on to one server and move the PHP and SQL, which load the CPU,
on another server. You just end up with two slow servers, one slow from overloaded drives
and one slow from overloaded CPU. Much better would have been to put tour videos
on one server and members videos on another, so that the disk load is split between the
servers. To make this kinds of decisions intelligently, you want a truly qualified sysadmin
to run some specific analysis on your system.

A proper analysis will result in a bunch of numbers, such as disk IOs per second and
MBs per second, each listed for read and write. (So four at least major numbers to describe
disk load, and hopefully a few more, like queue depth). If you get any recommendation not
backed by numbers, the person making the recommendation is either guessing, or suggesting
that you buy whatever they want to sell.

Very often, all that's needed is a couple of configuration adjustments, like using "noatime".
Taking about 5 minutes to set, noatime can often DOUBLE the capacity of a web server.
It's that kind of understanding and taking care that makes such a huge difference. You could
buy a whole new server and not reduce load much, and you can change one simple setting
to cut load in half. It's all about making a proper analysis of your systems to make the right
changes for your needs.

Hey everyone, thanks for the bad ass responses I'm really really happy with what you have all said posted here and thank you for it. Things of this nature will be a great concern to me in the near future, it would be awesome to have a nice big thread about things of this nature. Maybe in the Learning section.

Thanks a lot!

if you wanted to span your member area out across multiple servers you could code up a system using .htaccess (password protection) and then push the credentials out with your login requests to each authenticated login to cover all content servers, then you can server content from where you want to. you could use .htaccess mod_redirect to hide all the additional servers just link them under different folder names.

You could also use Strongbox handoff. Either way, to avoid analyzing log in credentials with
every hit, you'd want to do like Google, Yahoo, etc. and link from the main members page on
one server to the tranny gallery on another, so they switch servers only when they go to the
tranny gallery. The whole tranny gallery is on one server, then they might click a link to
the midget gallery on another server. (Like going from Google maps to Gmail to Google Docs).

don,t know much about this topic. though I do hope you get all the answers you are looking for . good luck.

So the Strongbox can protect members1.mysite.com and members2.mysite.com on 2 difference server ?

How Strongbox do this and how i configure it to do this ?

Yes. See:

http://www.bettercgi.com/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki.pl/Handoff

People with several sites and lots of content sometimes have each site as kind of a "front end" with the pages unique to that site.
Say you have latinawhores.com and latinbutts.com. Within the members area of each, they have a few pages unique to that site which then handoff to anal.latinacontent.com and exgf.latinacontent.com.

That's the same concept as GROUPS.google.com and MAPS.google.com, not 1.google.com and 42.google.com.