Magento configuration in a clustered environment

Apache

You're on the right track. Read-balancing across multiple instances gives you maximum concurrency. Read the whitepaper from Nexcess released at Imagine 2013 and tune your Apache properly. Use PHP-FPM. Use fast caches - Redis for FPC, backend cache. Use multiple Memcached, specifically for sessions. Use APC.

I've seen some recommendations where multiple memcache servers are used, such as one on each web server in the cluster. Wouldn't this cause problems and decrease performance when something is cached on one host and not the other?

In short, no. Read up on how memcache distribution works. There is no "right" answer here. Catalog size, traffic patterns, peak bursts, will all determine how you should tune your store.

MySQL

The client wants to use four MySQL servers (one master, three slaves).

Having worked for some of the highest-traffic sites in Magento I can absolutely say that there is no need for read-balancing across four instances. Especially with the benefits in EE 1.13 and FPC.

Read some information from @sonassi below about configuring Magento to handle +1 db (it does it out of box).

How to optimise database architecture for high volume sites?

If you still want to do this, I recommend using MySQL Proxy to split off read/write traffic and round-robin it.

Other considerations

  • Gigabit!
  • Avoid virtualization
  • Run DB's with tons of RAM
  • Run Apache with tons of CPU, even more RAM.
  • Use FPC
  • Use Redis
  • Use cloud storage for media. If it's not an option, NFS is suitable.

Want even more? Read this:

http://www.sonassi.com/knowledge-base/mysql-and-magento-peformance-tuning/


You’re on a great path with that cluster configuration. I strongly recommend a singular server for Redis or Memcached, rather than running instances on each web host.

Here’s the full list of configurations I’ve used for a highly available, fault tolerant, distributed, and load balanced LEMP cluster. It includes app/etc/local.xml, the core_config_data table, and configurations for MySQL, php-fpm, nginx, and Redis. All hosts run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit.

You should consider moving one or two of those database hosts to a cache role. I’m seeing a much heavier load on the host running Redis (sessions, backend, and FPC) than I am on the MySQL master and slave.

Highlights

  • Admin users: 46
  • Categories: 2,450 (largest one has 2,400 products)
  • Product entities: 101,000
  • Combo products: 484
  • Product relations: 54,000
  • In stock and enabled configurable products: 10,100
  • CMS blocks: 3,100
  • CMS pages: 1,400

August 2013 traffic:

  • 40 million monthly pageviews
  • 2.3 million unique visitors
  • 46,000 monthly checkouts
  • 89% of visitors from the USA

Web hosts

There are 10 hosts behind redundant, highly available hardware firewalls and hardware load balancers.

  • site-wide average response time: 282 ms
  • load average: 0.6 to 1.0 (in tests, performance degrades by 35% when load averages hit ~5.0)
  • Dual Intel Xeon CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz (4 cores each)
  • 32 GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM

Modules

  • https://github.com/colinmollenhour/Cm_RedisSession
  • https://github.com/colinmollenhour/Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis
  • https://github.com/aligent/CacheObserver.git --branch=models
  • https://github.com/aligent/Lokey_ShippingAdjustments
  • https://github.com/aligent/VF_CustomMenu.git --branch=production
  • https://github.com/Vinai/customer-activation
  • https://github.com/gknoppe-guidance/magento-cachebuster

Cache hosts

There are two hosts running Redis in a master-slave configuration with automated failover. Three Redis instances are used to increase throughput and provide fine-tuning of persistence behaviors.

  • 3,000 commands per second
  • 0.7 ms average response time
  • load average of 1.0 to 1.5
  • Quad Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz (6 cores each)
  • 128 GB buffered DDR3 1333 MHz RAM
  • Mechanical disks, RAID 1, hardware controller

Database hosts

There are two hosts running MySQL 5.6.11 in a master-slave configuration with warm failover.

  • 1,500 commands per second
  • 1.1 ms average response time
  • load average of 0.1 (master) and 0.4 (slave)
  • Quad Intel Xeon CPU E7- 2860 @ 2.27GHz (10 cores each)
  • 128 GB buffered DDR3 1333 MHz RAM
  • SSD, RAID 1+0, hardware controller
  • MySQL 5.6.11 with tcmalloc

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Configuration

Magento Enterprise

Enterprise 1.13

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