[OpenAFS] Using OpenAFS with Web Servers

Jacob Gorm Hansen jg@ioi.dk
21 Mar 2002 10:39:14 +0100


If you want to build a scaleable webserver, take a look at the LARD
(Locality Aware Resource Distribution if my mind serves correctly).
Basically what the authors suggest is a load-balancing scheme which lets
each server 'specialize' in some part of the content, hopefully meaning
that your effective memory-cache grows proportionally with the number of
web servers.

If you really want speed, I would suggest that you take a look at the
Tux in-kernel webserver for linux, and also that you serve from a real
local filesystem, maybe synced (from AFS or by other means) by a cron
job or something similar, which will always be faster than serving from
AFS, since AFS' added layer imposes some overhead.

The Intermezzo file system aims to do the syncing automatically, without
overhead on read operations, but is still somewhat experimental. Still
worth checking out though.

Best,
Jacob