10.5 Distributing the Filr Desktop Application Synchronization Traffic

The Filr desktop application can cause a large amount of traffic on the Filr servers. To prevent the Filr desktop application synchronization process or the Filr site from becoming slow, you can distribute the Filr desktop application traffic among dedicated Filr servers with your load balancer or reverse proxy server.

For example, if you have a Filr installation with four servers, you can dedicate one server to handle the Filr desktop application traffic and use the remaining three servers to serve the main Filr web application. This configuration prevents an unusual spike in the Filr desktop application traffic from impacting the Filr site.

You can distribute the Filr desktop application traffic differently, depending on whether you want traffic from all applications (not just the Filr desktop application) that are accessing Filr to be handled in the same way, or whether you want the Filr desktop application traffic to be handled independently from each other and from other applications that are accessing Filr.

10.5.1 Distributing Filr Desktop Application Traffic Separately from Other Applications

You can configure your load balancer or reverse proxy server to distribute Filr desktop application synchronization traffic among multiple Filr servers. Filr desktop application traffic is independent of traffic from other applications that are accessing Filr.

NOTE:Your load balancer or reverse proxy server must be able to make routing decisions based on the request headers.

  1. Configure your load balancer or reverse proxy server to use the user agent request header. For the Filr desktop application, the request header begins with NovellFilrDesktop.

    For example: User-Agent: NovellFilrDesktop/1.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Python/2.7.0; en_US) suds/0.4.

    For specific information on how to configure the load balancer or reverse proxy server, see Section 10.5.3, Load Balancer and Reverse Proxy Server Configuration.

10.5.2 Distributing Filr Desktop Traffic in Conjunction with Other Applications

You can configure your load balancer or reverse proxy server to distribute Filr desktop application synchronization traffic (along with traffic coming from all other applications that use the Filr Web service interface) among multiple Filr servers.

Examples of other applications that use the Filr Web service interface:

  • GroupWise client SOAP requests

  • All other SOAP requests from third-party applications

NOTE:Your load balancer or reverse proxy server must be able to make routing decisions based on the HTTP URL path.

  1. Configure your load balancer or reverse proxy server to send all HTTP requests for the Filr desktop application (designated by the following paths /ssf/ws/TeamingServiceV1 and /rest/*) to one pool of Filr servers.

    All other requests are sent to another pool of Filr servers.

    For specific information on how to configure the load balancer or reverse proxy server, see Section 10.5.3, Load Balancer and Reverse Proxy Server Configuration.

10.5.3 Load Balancer and Reverse Proxy Server Configuration

For information on how to configure a reverse-proxy server for your Filr site, see Changing Reverse Proxy Configuration Settings in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Installation and Configuration Guide.