New Power Cluster
We built our first web server cluster because we realized that standalone servers can’t be counted on to reliably host business websites. When the Standard Cluster was launched in 2004, it was certainly the most dependable shared platform in Australia.
As time has passed, the system has continued to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. In fact, the Standard Cluster itself has a flawless uptime record since April, 2004.
In this same period, we’ve learned a great deal by observing the tremendous volume of data served by the Standard Cluster. Some months ago we realized that with a clean slate, we could build a more powerful cluster that would be more than just reliable. It would serve pages faster than any cluster online.
Three specific advances now contribute to the Power Cluster’s increased performance:
1. Static pages are served instantly and no longer queued behind dynamic PHP or Perl pages;
2. PHP and Perl pages are processed more efficiently by a dedicated server instance on each cluster node;
and
3. All outbound http traffic is compressed on the fly, increasing raw download speeds.
As well as improving performance, the Power Cluster gave us the opportunity to improve our PHP session handling. Thanks to a new and proprietary management system, sessions on the Power Cluster will no longer be dropped in the rare event of a failure in a cluster node.
Finally, the Power Cluster is configured with PHP 5, while the Standard Cluster will continue to use PHP 4 in the medium term.
Further reading:
About the Power cluster
