I am just curious how many people are running DNN in a webfarm approach using multiple web-heads pointing to a single File Server and separate database, as configured in the Web Farm Support document in the DNN 4.3.1 documentation.

Can anyone offer any guidance on possible pitfalls to this approach? If anyone is being successful in this please let me know.

I have been with DNN since version 1 and have a few dedicated servers running now. I am, however, in the process of setting up a php based social networking site using a PHPFox script. At PHPFox, they are a little lean on technical support, so I thought I would ask my DNN buddies what they thought about employing the same web farm approach on my php based script. It looks pretty straightforward and I have 4 win 2003 servers setup already with a load balancer on the front end, two web servers, a db server and an additional server that can work as the File Server if needed. I am just not sure if I can use this approach on any script or if it has to be built to handle this.

Thanks for any ideas or help anyone can provide...especially since this is a little off-topic. But in general, as my hosting business grows I do envision using web farm support in DNN, so I would like to know how well this is working for others.

Cliff

In order for a script to use web farm architecture, it is important that any server could process a particular request be retreiving any information it needs from a shared file system, shared database, or tucked into the page request itself (cookies, postpack)...  Therefore a PHP script could use this type of architecture only if it did not rely on local variables on the server being used to store information about the state of the application.  In the case of ASP.NET this is ussually done by having the session object stored in the database to be retreived; however there are other ways to solve the problem also.