[elephant-devel] Understanding real-world use of Elephant

[Henrik Hjelte]

I'm in the same situation, hoping to have several web servers connected
to one store, and this is the setup I will use. The reason for
multithreading in a web app as I see it is mostly to make use of several
processors, which is not something solved with the allegrocache paper if
I remember it right, since allegro multithreading only makes use of one
processor/core. SBCL could do this, but to avoid possible unidentified
troubles I instead start several single-threaded processes on the same
machine, and use a proxy with sticky sessions (pound) to distribute
requests between several processes. That also has the advantage that the
processes need not be on the same physical machine, so it should be
scalable. I think that SQL databases are a safer bet than Berkeley DB
for having several processes on different machines talking to the same
store, so I will have one instance of postgresql running on a server
with scsi raid 10 and lots of ram.
I have done some stress testing with this solution and am happy with it
so far, it is a bit memory hungry though.

Good luck,
Henrik Hjelte