Hello,

I'm on the verge of starting a relatively big - in terms of users and customizations - SugarCRM project. One of the things the client wants to have is multiple web servers connecting to the same, clustered, database. This is to achieve the performance and high availability requirements.

Off the top of my head I can see 2 potential problems:
- document handling: uploaded documents need to be made available to all webservers immediately. To handle this I was thinking about changing the 'upload_dir' parameter of the sugar config to an nfs mounted directory. This way all webservers would have access to it, and since the sugar uploaded files are prepended with UIDs, there won't be issues with concurrent writes. Since the uploaded files will only be used on certain occasions (ie not on all accesses) I don't think we'll have performance issues. This will also be suitable for whichever backup mechanism they go with, I think/hope.

- session handling: I'm a bit puzzled over this one. I immediately thought of doing the same nfs based thing for the 'session_dir' in config.php, but am wondering if performance-wise this will hold. I'm also looking at somehow make the webserver load balancer always sending requests from an established session (as seen in the PHPSESSID) to the same webserver, which - in my mind - would also work.

Does this look completely ridiculous to anyone, am I missing something? Does anyone have any experiences with using multiple web servers for sugar they could share, it would be a great help...

thanks for your help
diogo