Implementation Considerations

Implementation Considerations

An option to storing MediaRich data on local is disk is to utilize network shares. Location and type of share are important issues since a networked share (that all servers have access to) usually decreases performance, since you now have added communications lag to the disk seek and access times.Method One – Complete – Share your ‘originals’ and ‘results’ root
If you have multiple MediaRich generators there is potential for serious performance degradation, because the original is retrieved via the NIC and the derivative image is also written via the NIC. The upside to this is that an image needs to be generated only once. This could prove to be worthwhile if you don’t change your images frequently or you serve a majority of your images static. Shared roots also take up less storage space overall.

Method Two – A ‘Shared Originals’ root

The primary benefit to this type of share is that you only have to maintain one set of originals and the only lag times will be in retrieving the originals. All of the derivatives are stored locally as well as the logs. Each box must generate it’s own images and you will be doing more generations overall.

Method Three – No share

Here, each generator is essentially self-contained. This means that each generator must have all of the images and all of the scripts. The downside to this is increased maintenance overhead since all of the generators originals roots must be maintained, and no matter what will end up out of sync. Once again each generator will have to generate each image.

implementation_table

The number of originals and derivatives becomes a major consideration when installing MediaRich and determining the level of performance you require. Since you essentially have unlimited storage on each generator you can do what ever you want without worry.

Remember, MediaRich caches to disk all of its results. More files on disk leads to longer seek times and increased latency, thus decreasing performance.  You also need to be aware of other applications running on the server as any application accessing the hard drives will affect MediaRich’s performance. Thus leaving yourself a margin of error of only 10% above the storage projected on the disk will probably result in poor performance. Whereas, a better margin of error could result in better performance.

Tuning the server for the load that you have projected is always worthwhile.

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