Hi guys,

what do you think is the most efficient way of handling the server architecture for a DNN Website that is access from all over the world, thousand times a second, with quiet a lot of graphics involved. Users should be able to access it as one site.

Especially the SQL Server part I'm very interested in. How to keep performance up?
Usage of servers and server locations is not limited.

What would you propose?

Thank you very much in advance!

thanks for you answer!

do you think it is appropriate to have several servers in each location or have one central web farm?
how would that effect the latency?

if several servers, how to keep them in sync easily?

* The Situation *
Let's suppose it would be an online shop, sort of like amazon: operating worldwide, offering localized content and products and having login accounts that are limited to the country one registered to.

On each 'country server' is a) the common portal data and b) the localized content for this country only, so Australian products on the Australian server and USA products on the USA server.


* The Problem *
But now suppose a company in Australia offers some products for sale. Obviously they can easily put them on the Australien site, however, they want to offer them in the USA. What to do?


* The Ideas *
Yet, I still only got vague ideas how to solve this.

1.)
They register on the USA site as well and have multiple accounts.
PRO: No extra effort for me.
CON: The company has to manually create all needed data (products, prices, address) in each portal, a lot of redundancy, no overview about all site activities
-> I don't like that

2.)
The SQL Server 2005 integrates e.g. the products table so that each country can access the entire table ("Partioning" I think).
PRO: All data is available from every site worldwide, SQL Server does all the work, no coding involved
CON: A lot of traffic, probably high latency

3.)
I "manually" keep the data on each server in sync (with redundancy). The company can manage their products as usual on the Australien site, and can "flag" some products to be sold in the USA. In the background the server sends off the necessary data to the USA server where it is now also available. Later changed are also kept in sync (only sync when changes occor, in order to minimize traffic).
PRO: VERY big effort for me
CON: Minimized traffic with redundancy, high availability in each region

2./3)
Combine 2.) & 3.) I don't manually send all the data but only like a ProductID and a CountryID, so the local site can then figure out where the data is to be fetched from.
PRO: Still more effort than 2.), but easier than 3.)
CON: Big traffic, higher latency than 3.) & lower latency than 2.)

4.)
Getting rid of the country servers and put it all in a single web farm.
PRO: No long distance server communication, lower traffic costs, easier technical solution than 2.) & 3.)
CON: Latency? (eBay has 3 web farms in the USA, however, they put 95% of traffic through local servers near the client, there has to be a reason...)
When I try to open ebay.de here in New Zealand it takes 4-5 seconds to load the entire page. I wouldn't like online shoping with this latency...

I like the web farm idea very much, still I am quiet anxious about the performance/latency issue.
What do you think?