Posted by joemoraca on February 7, 2010 at 2:24pm
This is very impressive. I was quickly able to get a "high power" drupal install up and running in under a half hour on my first try.
Thanks again for everyones work on moving drupal to the cloud.
I was playing around trying to do a multi-site install is this possible? I had problems with changes on one site impacting the other site - maybe the extensive caching? Is it best to just setup separate instances of drupal?
Comments
Multisite: yes!
Hey Joe, thanks for the positive feedback! To answer your question:
I was playing around trying to do a multi-site install is this possible? I had problems with changes on one site impacting the other site - maybe the extensive caching? Is it best to just setup separate instances of drupal?
Multisite is definitely supported and encouraged. In the future we'll be integrating/bundling with the Aegir system, which is based on a multisite architecture.
When you operate a multi-site, you are able to take full advantage of APC's opcode caching since the various end-user facing sites are actually sharing a common codebase: they are running the same application with a different set of configuration and data. This is a much more efficient use of resources than having many separate Drupal cores installed.
There are improvements coming to the Varnish module which will make it much more multisite-friendly — dynamic cache-clearing for only some domains and not others — but there's nothing in there that should be causing cross-site changes.
Can you describe your problems in a little more detail?
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
multi-site issues
I had two domain names pointing to the server (used CNAME records pointing to public URL as suggested in EC2 docs ) and had a folder for each domain in the sites folder ... did the whole multi-site setup (I have several multi-site setups on other servers).
The content I created for each domain worked as expected but the themes I picked for each domain didn't seem to stick - I would change the theme on one domain and then go to the other domain and refresh the page and the theme carried over -- last updated theme showed on both domains. Also the site name seemed to do the same thing.
The domains were pointed to different databases and I frequently went to the performance admin page and cleared the caches...
I have "shut down" my server - I spent $1.85 ;) so I can't give you access to test it. I will test it out again and post my findings - it certainly could have been something I did.
Thanks again for the work being done on this cool project.
Joe Moraca
WebDevGeeks.com
Make sure you manually enter
Make sure you manually enter a unique "prefix" for each site in the cacherouter settings of each site's settings.php file.
Yep
Definitely sounds like cache pollution. A quick way to test this is to see if the problem "fixes" itself if you clear the cache in /admin/settings/performance.
Basically what's happening here is: un-optimized drupal stores all its settings in the database, and caches them there too. Mercury doesn't use the database for caching, and instead uses APC or memcache. When you multi-site, you create a new database (or set of prefixed tables), and with Mercury you also need to slice off a distinct area for caches also, otherwise even through there are two separate "variables" tables, their cached representations will constantly overwrite one-another.
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
thanks for the help
I will try this out soon. Seems easy enough to test.
So the best way to use rackspace cloud servers would be to follow the directions on http://groups.drupal.org/pantheon/mercurywiki the install wiki page?
Joe Moraca
WebDevGeeks.com
Yes
Running off the rackspace cloud, you'll be starting with a stock Jaunty server. Their base is a little more barebones than the AMI we used for EC2, so there may be a few more required packages. We'll work on updating the wiki as we're able.
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com