We're at the juncture (I can even say, right time) that we need to separate our database server apart from our application web server. This we arrived at after careful & thorough monitoring of the server (load average, CPU usage, etc.) itself.
When the database server is separated:
What would be the ideal setup/best practice for network communication path between 2 servers? If it were running on the same server, connectivity between database and application would make use of TCP/IP communication, but how it should be running/setup when it is separated, so that performance is not majorly affected? For example, currently our JDBC URL looks like
jdbc:postgresql://localhost:9999/ourproductiondb
, probably thislocalhost
would be changed to private IP address of the database server.In our application, we also allow application users to submit/attach attachments (.txt, .doc, .pdf, .xls, etc.), which are actually stored physically in server disk and only its file path is stored in the database. Which is the ideal place/approach for maintaining/keeping documents physically, either in application web server or in database server?
We're very new into this area of separating database as a separate server and our knowledge on this is very limited. Therefore, any resources, links, documentation, articles, guidelines, suggestion etc. in this regard are highly welcome and really appreciated.
NOTE: Our tools of trade are: RHEL5 64-bit, Apache Tomcat 6.0.10, JDK 1.6, PostgreSQL 8.2.22, pgpool 2.0.1