Sybase ASE & server distribution

["Aaron D. Turner" <aturner@best.com>]

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http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayTC.pl?/reviews/981207ase1103.htm

Interesting article on Sybase's free SQL server for Linux.  This might be
worth looking into as MySQL does have a major flaw currently: a nasty
memory leak.  I know for a fact that Slashdot runs MySQL, and they've got
a script called 'fuck' that restarts it when memory starts filling up.  We
may not want to deal with that.

The one issue, is apparently ASE (at least for the reviewer) won't use
more than 50MB of RAM.  That won't be acceptable for our use, but that
problem could very well be a configuration error.  Maybe someone can try
some newsgroups and see what others are finding out about it.  It's also
not supported by Sybase and there's no source code (but I wouldn't know
what to do with it even if I had it), but it is well documented.

On another note, I thought of a interesting idea that I think is worth
doing.  If you guys do swing a system from IBM, what about co-locating the
systems at the same site?  The obvious advantage of this is that we can do
load distribition/failover should one server crash or if we want to take
it down for maintenance.  I have quite a bit of real world experiance
trying to use DNS Round Robin for load balancing and I can tell you it is
horrible.  It also provides no failover capability.

If we can get the IBM box here in Calif., NaviSite would provide us usage
of their shared Cisco Local Director farm.  This way both boxes would have
the same IP in DNS, but the LD would distribute the load according to the
percentages we define.  Also it automattically detects when a server goes
down for any reason, and redirects all requests to the remaining
server(s). Data replication issues become easier since both boxes are on
the same LAN too.

I think this is something we should seriously consider.  I've been running
the network for Vicinity's corporate site which has done in excess of 70
million page views a month and this is *the* way to do it IMHO.

- -- 
Aaron Turner           | Either which way, one half dozen or another. 
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