Stand Alone DB: Worth it?
Since many of the sites basically use copies of the same tables (I.E. calendar, geography info, etc.) I'm considering making a standalone MySQL linode from which all the sites would pull. (reference library link
The first obvious thing I see is requiring two db connections per site, for the main and site-specific DBs.
Is this a good idea, or am I just making more work in the long run?
2 Replies
With the database separate, you can take advantage of multiple web servers to scale an app for instance.
Without those tests, any answer you get would be no better then a coin toss.
Each website will have it's own characteristics and it's own traffic patterns. Depending on what those are, a standalone db might have better performance, it might not - the only way to KNOW is to test both scenarios.
In my OPINION (for my production boxes), a standalone DB is rarely worth the extra network traffic and system administration overhead unless you are maxing out the server in Web app usage alone, at which point I'd up the server specs instead of splitting the app servers - YMMV.