Tom.Thomson (8/22/2010)
Ninja's_RGR'us (8/22/2010)
My first instinct was to build a vpn tunnel between the servers but then I remembered that we can only have 1 vpn connection on 1 machine at any time, so how the heck can I go to 3500 (or more to the point 4-5 at the same time) and also very important, how can the connection be made in real time (1 sec delay max)?I don't know what kind of servers you are using but I find a 1 vpn connection per machine limit astounding (and I wouldn't give such a server OS house-room!). Where I worked from 2002 to 2009 we used Windows 2000 Server at first and later Windows 2003 Server and had many simultaneous VPN connections from our main in-house server in London to customer servers all around the world and to our other offices. Not 3500 connections at one time (nowhere near, in fact) but a good deal more than 4 or 5 on Win 2000 Server and when we went to Win 2003 we grew to more connections than we had had on Win 2000.
Connection setup time depends very much on two things: firewall performance (at both ends) and network performance (both latency and bandwidth are relevant); if customers have good internet connection, decent and sensibly configured firewalls, and competent network management you can get 1 sec setup time provided the loop delay is not too great (you're obviously not going to get 1 second connection setup if the loop delay is 1.5 seconds).
Even if your connection time is good you can't guarantee that it won't suddenly go bad: our connection setup times for customers in the Middle East increased by a large factor when some sailor accidentally cut through an underwater cable there. DO you need to maintain the 1 sec connection setup time limit when something like that happens?
Thanks for the correction on VPN, my only experience was from desktop to server with Cisqo where everthing gets cutoff besides that connection.
The site I'm working on basically takes in a few parameters, wades through 20 000 items and suggests all available matches (like all possible cpu cores to fit the sockets of mother board X) and shows about 25 columns of relevant data to make a decision.
The site is already slow as hell (to my taste) and adding another 2-5 seconds to get that single extra column of data is just out of the question in my mind. So I want to have instant access to the data like if it were in the sams db in the same server. Now I know I have no control over the internet and the clients' network but I'll do everything I can to limit the steps and required time it takes for the connection.
We have no hard data yet as this is the first go-live for this project, but on a similar seach form we do get over 5000 searches per hour in peak rush. Certainly no google volumes, but nope a mom and pop shop either. And since this is a new flagship system, it is being used to bring in larger whale customers so I imagine those number will greatly increase in the near futur.
Now I can't imagine myself being happy having to wait 5-8 seconds to load a page everytime I do a search in rush hours (where you have 5 other customers waiting in line to be served).
Hence my requriement for as 0 ms connection time as possible.