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NAME="farming">2.2. Farming</H1
><P
> This is an interesting topic. When you think of a
server you tend to think of a single machine running
a single program. Farming is the idea of multiple machines
running multiple programs that all act together to
appear to be one machine/program.
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> Why farming? Two reasons with equal importance. Scalability
and Reliability.
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> Scalability is the idea of allowing something to handle
many many more connections/transactions at the same time.
A typcial web server can handle say 1000 connections a
second, but 10 web servers acting together can provide
10,000 connections per second.
</P
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> Reliability is the idea that even if a piece of the system
goes down, the system does not. There is no single point
of failure, and there is built in redundancy to ensure
that something is there to pick up the slack if something
goes down. In the web server example, if one web server
goes down you could not send any connections to it until
it is back up, thus ensuring that your web site is always
up.
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> Both of these ideas are crucial to a successful Farming
strategy. Each wants to push the design into a different
direction, but they can be reconciled into a single
design that can scale and is reliable at the same time.
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