[LON-CAPA-admin] Load Balancing

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

In response to my request for student course enrollment statistics, 
earlier today I received an email stating that their school had quit 
using LON-CAPA half-way into the semester, because their 512 MB RAM 
server overloaded on deadline nights. They are purchasing a bigger 
machine.

We could have probably saved the day by load-balancing against other 
servers in the cluster, until the new server arrives. Please check out 
your file

/home/httpd/lonTabs/spare.tab

I would recommend to edit this file (using vi or emacs, not a 
DOS/Windows/Mac computer) to say

msua1
msua2
msua3
msua4
msua5

(one line per server name, no extra spaces, etc).

What this will do is to offload sessions to the MSU cluster if your own 
server overloads. If other sys-admins would be willing to also donate 
some CPU cycles in peak workload times, please reply to this email. 
This will be especially effective if we work across time zones.

- Gerd.