[ic] Scalable usage of Interchange

Paul Jordan paul at gishnetwork.com
Mon Apr 16 22:22:07 EDT 2007


Dear group

I am in the need to know which of these ways is the more scalable way to
use IC. I am going to use the term "IC" and "catalog" interchangeably
since any catalog can be easily combined or split from any IC instance.

Interchange is predominantly used for an ecommerce shopping cart. If it
is a very busy cart, having the cart under its own (not shared with
other cats) IC daemon is a good move. Now let's say you have a web mail
client made in interchange. If there are many users checking their
mailboxes, replying, etc I'd think that would be the equivalent of a
"busy shopping cart" therefore should be on it's own daemon. The same
goes for other "types" of interchange usages.

So, if one were to have an ecommerce store, web mail and CRM would it
make sense to have designed them in their own IC installs? I mean,
regardless IF they are busy... When they are busy I was thinking, should
I be able to have an IC install for webmail, and another for the store,
and so on. 

Obviously, moving Mysql to it's own server, Sendmail to it's own server,
Apache and IC, and so on are great moves, but in the end, if all these
apps are designed in one IC install - would that be the achilles heal?

That brings me to my second question. If it is a good idea to move the
"major applications" to their own IC installs, does that not make
database management a nightmare? For example, I have both single and
multiple catalog installs (with multiple apps running in each) and today
I was going to do some preliminary CMS type work for an ecomerce
website. The ecommerce website runs as it's own catalog, and the CRM
runs as it's own catalog. This may have been shortsighted because while
the small amount of table sharing being done now is bearable, adding the
new CMS stuff is adding to the confusion. - And, to think positively,
there will be more situations like this in the future.

So on one hand I have my single catalogs with multiple apps all which
are low volume right now. Things are very easy to add, enhance, etc -
the IC way.  I also have my version that runs on two catalogs - seems
more scalable, but there in lies the nightmare.

What I am hoping to hear is that one IC catalog is the way to go and if
things got crazy busy something like this could be done:

http://www.icdevgroup.org/pipermail/interchange-users/2001-April/007637.
html

Without much drama dismantling a busy catalog.

TIA

Paul



More information about the interchange-users mailing list