Date:  10/23/2008 10:18:23 AM Msg ID:  003827
From:  Ali Koumaiha Thread:  003826
Subject:  Re: Anybody running Load Balanced servers?
We're running similar to what you have, except on IIS.

We have 3 Servers.
Web Server + SQL on it.
Data Server (with VFP Apps) and the Web Server accesses it (hosts accounting and back-end applications in vfp)
Graphic Server/Storage, which also is accessed by the Web Server.

Also, we have a Hybrid Portal that runs ASP.NET C# with other FoxWeb that accesses online ordering, accounting, shopping cart, reporting, etc..

Both ASP.Net and FoxWeb also access the SQL Back-End

And performance is excellent so far.
Sent by David Hempy on 10/23/2008 09:08:34 AM:
For one of our sites, we run a pair of load-balanced Windows servers.  Each server is running Apache 2.0.  We use FoxWeb for some of our pages.
When we went to load balancing, we moved the Visual FoxPro database files off of the web server onto a back-end server (same as we did for the static document root) that both servers access.  This was far easier for us to pull off than having duplicates of the database and figuring out how to keep them synchronized.  
This has proved effective for our needs.  We've resolved the performance issues we were facing prior to load balancing.  (BTW, those were general web server load issues, nothing related to FoxWeb's performance).
We do see a handful of VFP errors in the error log each day: "Database object is being used by someone else." This occurs maybe 3-5 times per day, out of many thousands of hits.  These are not mission-critical pages, and are display only (not recording user transactions), so this error rate is acceptable to us for these pages.  
I should state that the code we wrote for these pages takes a very simpleton approach to accessing the database...no attempt is made to lock/check for locks/timeout/retry/etc.  Just your basic select and scan -- whatever VFP's default behavior is in a multiuser environment, that's what we've got. 
I'm curious if anyone else is using FoxPro (and FoxWeb) in a load balanced or similar multi-user environment.  How did you approach it, and how is it working for you?  Are there best practices?  

I look forward to an open discussion on this,
-dave
--
David Hempy
Internet Database Administrator
Kentucky Educational Television
(859)258-7164 - (800)333-9764