Planning your multi-server architecture

Infinite Blue offers the following recommendations for scaling in a multi-server environment:

• Run database servers and PAS or Tomcat servers on different physical machines (not on virtual machines using the same physical server).
• Hosts for databases should have high performance CPUs and at least 8GB of RAM.
• Hosts for PAS or Tomcat should have a 64-bit OS and have at least 8GB of RAM each (the more the better; also make sure to allocate as much as possible to your Tomcat heap).
• If you are using Tomcat, be sure to install 64-bit versions of Java and Tomcat on each server.
• To provide load balancing, use an NGINX server to perform the routing of requests to the Tomcat instances. You can have as many of these NGINX servers as needed for load balancing.
• Infinite Blue recommends performing load tests with an initial version of your infrastructure. This can help you identify areas of slow performance and give you time to adjust before you have thousands of concurrent users using the system.

With powerful servers and a low complexity app, you should be able to handle anywhere from 250 to over 1000 concurrent users per server. However, this depends on the database and CPU demands of your Platform applications.