Kalivo.com - Distributing MySQL

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Distributing MySQL
by Eric Larson on 2008-05-20 08:26 PM read 320 times

In looking at how we can improve performance, the idea is to upgrade our deployment configuration to include a more distributed model. This essentially uses proxies to balance the load and help with global caching. Likewise, we would like to implement a more distributed model in our database configuration.

The first logical step is to use a master/slave configuration on a dedicated box. The question then is how Rails handles utilizing the correct database connection for reads and writes. There are current two basic plugins for doing this:

The first is Masochism (http://ar-code.svn.engineyard.com/plugins/masochism/README). This makes an effort to do all reads from a production database and utilizing a master for writes and replicating to the slaves. The other is the Mysql Replication Adapter (http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/?p=5). This is a very similar system with the one deficiency being it is MySQL only.

I did not find an concensus on either plugin regarding what is the best way usage. In both cases, it seems like we will need to reevaluate our deployment strategies to move beyond simply updating SVN.