I have a large dynamic forum, and trying to use load balancing to split load on to more than just one server. Dedicated web server for apache+ dedicated database server for mysql does not work well. The apache server always has load as high as 100, and mysql load is always below 1 :confused:

So, I am trying to do load balancing apache on both server, and mysql on one of them. But the problem came as how do I synchronize the uploaded or dynamically generated html pages? I am trying to use rsync, but might need it as often as every minute, and bidirection.

It seems to adds lots of load to server to use rsync to synchronize contents from both ends at 1 minute frequency, as the directory that rsync needs to scan are quite large.

Anybody has any better idea?

Or can I at least let two server run rsync at different time? Using syntax like the following

*/2 * * * * root rsync ....

Seems to cause both server always tries to run at the same time.

Any advice appreciated,

Thanks,

If you just want to run the cron at different times on both servers, you could set one of the servers to the following:
1-59/2 * * * * root rsync ....
The above would cause the script to run at 1, 3, 5, ..... 57, 59 minutes of the hour.

1) Install eacclerator if you have not
2) Setup a seperate server running thttpd for images. This will help reduce the apache load.
3) If you want to keep images sync'ed you may want to setup a NAS seperatly. Then you can have the 2+ httpd boxes get the images from this central server. This would take out the problem of syncing and should help with the load some.