Clustering in eZ publish 3.8
Tuesday 13 June 2006 4:18:00 am
This article explains the eZ publish 3.8 clustering architecture. It also discusses problems with clustering in previous eZ publish versions, shows how these issues have been resolved in version 3.8, and gives you an idea of the results you can expect from clustering.
The most CPU-intensive aspect of eZ publish is the PHP processing. This processing transforms the content stored in the eZ publish object database to XHTML, which is then displayed by a web browser. Adding servers to a site improves its performance. A site can handle more concurrent users and provide faster response times. Additional servers also limit the impact on site visitors when people are using the eZ publish Administration Interface. In fact, eZ publish administration can be configured to run on an entirely separate server from the ones that handle normal site traffic.
The following diagram shows the number of requests per second that server(s) can handle when using a range of one to four web servers (and one database server). Our tests suggest that, assuming identical servers, each web server doubles the performance of the original server. Therefore, an eZ publish installation spread across four servers provides performance throughput four times greater than a single server.
Comparative performance of one to four servers.