[TYPO3-doc] Documentation servers

[François Suter]

Hi all,

Yesterday with Martin we discussed our current server setup and how it 
should work in the future. This is what we currently have:

- srv123.typo3.org (a.k.a. preview.docs.typo3.org) is currently used for 
everything, rendering the documentation and serving it too.
- srv130.typo3.org (a.k.a. docs.typo3.org) is supposed to be the "final" 
docs server.

That's where opinions diverge. In my vision, srv123 becomes the 
rendering server. Its only mission in life is to receive rendering 
requests and perform them. srv130 OTOH has only one goal: to server 
documentation pages.

The advantage of this separation is that srv130 never runs the risk of 
being slow (or even down) if some documentation rendering task takes a 
huge load (for example, upon a TYPO3 release, with all the sysext 
manuals, plus official manuals following up).

The disadvantage, of course, is that srv123 needs to post its stuff to 
srv130 after rendering. We need a way to make that efficient. I would 
say rsync should be quite fine for such a job.

We also need to consider database issues. We plan to have the FLOW3 
application that coordinates the whole show create database entries for 
each manual/version/language combo. If the rendering happens on srv123 
that entry will be created there, but srv130 needs to be aware of it 
too. There are several solutions:

- use the same DB (e.g. srv123 accesses the DB on srv130)
- use MySQL's replication tools (which may be tricky if srv130 starts 
collecting data too in the future, for example comments)
- have some form of messaging for one server to inform the other.

Your opinions are very welcome.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch