Performance Issues to consider when installing MediaRich.
Location and type of share are important issues since a networked share that all servers have access to usually decreases performance since you have added in communications lag to the disk seek and access lag times.
The first type of share is your originals root and your results root are shared you may end up taking a serious performance hit, if you have multiple generators. Since the original is retrieved via the NIC and the resultant image is written via the NIC. The upside to this is that you only generate an image once, which could prove to be worthwhile if you don’t change your images real often, or you serve a majority of you images static. Shared roots also take up less storage space overall.
A second type of share possible with MediaRich is a Shared Originals root the benefit to this type of share is that you only have to maintain one set of originals and the only lag times will be in getting the originals. All of the resultants are stored locally and the logs are also local. Of course then each box must generate it’s own images and you will be doing more generations overall.
Then you can always opt to have no share and each generator is essentially self-contained. This means that each generator must have all of the images and all of the scripts. The down side to this is the maintenance overhead since all of the generators originals roots must be maintained, and no matter what will end up out of sink. Once again each generator will have to generate each image.
|
Type of share |
Benefit |
Cost |
|
Complete |
Easy to maintain |
Large performance hit |
|
Complete |
Minimal storage requirements |
Increased wear on drives |
|
|
|
|
|
Originals only |
Fairly easy to maintain |
Slight performance hit |
|
|
|
|
|
No Share |
Very fast |
Difficult to maintain |
|
No Share |
Plenty of fail over room |
Large storage requirements |
|
No Share |
|
Constantly out of sink |
The number of originals and results becomes a major consideration when installing MediaRich and deciding what type of performance you want. Since if you essentially unlimited storage on each generator you can do what ever you want with out worry. Remember MediaRich disk caches all of its results. The fuller the disk gets the longer the seek and latency times become, on the drives thus decreasing performance. Also remember that if you are running something that access the hard drives you will affect MediaRich’s performance. Thus leaving yourself a margin of error of only 10% above the storage projected on the disk will probably result in poor performance. Where as a better margin of error could result in better performance.
Of course tuning the server for the load that you have projected is always worthwhile. |
