Hi,
I run thematic SMF 2.0 forum that works smoothly most of the time, but once a year, due to external event, traffic increases several times and forum goes down because of OOM problems.
I don't want to upgrade hardware because it happens only once a year for one day.
I consider opportunity of putting up copy of SMF for that day, so configuration will be: loadbalancer (nginx) -> two SMF upstreams on different hosts -> one database (mysql).
Is that look viable? Unfortunately, free nginx version does not support sticky sessions and i'm not sure if there will be any SMF problems if nginx will balance traffic depending on source ip.
Someone had such experience?
How big is your board in terms of posts?
We do have a hidden big board forum with users who have more advanced setups.
We have 1M+ posts.
You don't really need sticky session support if you're sharing the database between the instances and using database sessions (or you're using memcache that also shares the settings). As long as the actual cookies make it through and you share the sessions properly, SMF won't care.
The only issue you might have is that you need to make sure you pass through the original IP somehow onto the SMF instances so that bans etc work.
It worth mention that i did try that setup and it worked well.
What is the hardware configuration or the virtual one in use in terms of CPU, CPU Cores, RAM, storage, etc?