Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: OpenACS with virtual hosting

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Posted by Mark Aufflick on
Just another datapoint for you. I proxy to multiple openacs instances with the Apache reverse proxy module.

The choice was mostly from convenience - the server was already a hosting server runnning Apache 2.0 with virtual servers, so i just had to add the appropriate config entries and Bob was my Uncle.

These sites only see a moderate amount of traffic. The server also hosts another openacs instance directly on it's own IP with ssl (I don't believe tthere is a way to reverse proxy ssl without kludges, although I seem to remember pound can?), a number of apache virtual hosts and a number of email domains.

It's actually a vmware virtual machine sharing a compaq server with another virtual machine. This particular virtual machine has 1006 Mb Ram, a gig of swap (again on virtualized hard disk on a scsi 5 raid). There are 3 openacs sites, one dotLRN site (which uses more ram) using a variety of aolserver and postgres  versions. It averages about 960 meg ram used and 242 meg swap used.

It hasn't skipped a beat so far, and I love the flexibility of the apache proxy - i can reload the config to add another virtual site without a millisecond of outage to the other sites.

I can also configure a custom html error page to show when the aolserver sites are unreachable during the (long) openacs startup time which is nice.