Smarty

[rudder]

In a continuation of a post I made to a thread about compile times being problematic in high traffic sites, it was suggested that I use NFS mounted templates_c. Here are some quotes:

[emt]

I have worked with high load servers before using rsync extensively, and I cannot see any problems with your proposed method. The only thing you have to be careful about is that the paths to the templates, templates_c and cache are identical on each individual server.

I would also be careful about the order you push updates - if you push "templates" first then you could easily trigger a template recompile if you have compile checking on.

I would advise that on the production servers you have compile_check turned off - it shouldn't be needed in production anyway if you compile all the templates on the deployment server. Also, rsync by default deletes before transfer which again could trigger a compile from a template that is supposed to be removed.

I would modify your proposed method slightly:

* Push files to DEPLOYMENT server
* Delete everything in templates_c on DEPLOYMENT
* Compile All Templates
* rsync to PRODUCTION with "rsync -a --delete-after"

Make sure you preserve timestamps etc (I would use '-a' option on rsync if your usernames and group names are consistent across all environments as well).

Should work a treat.

[mohrt]

Everything is a give and take. rsync requires more management. NFS is technically a single point of failure, but this can be rectified with RAID drives and a stable OS and redundant hardware components. I have an NFS server that has run for many years without trouble. Be sure you run NFS on a fast (gigabit+) network with UDP as protocol for minimal network overhead.

You can also create a hot failover for NFS with DRDB.

http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat

[emt]

rsync can definitely be more management, but on the other side NFS can give you problems that are VERY hard to detect and troubleshoot sometimes.

I would suggest that your PHP routine that calls the compile all templates also executes the rsync automatically afterwards to remove synchronisation issues.