Question

I have a web portal and the web portal has web services API.

Which solution would be best and why?

Should I….

1) Run the web portal and the web portal API on the same server or

2) Run the web portal and the web portal API on separate servers

Answer 1

It’s all a matter of trading off different forces, there just can’t be the same answer for everybody.

Here’s a few things to consider:

1. Having the UI (portal) and it’s dependent services on the same box makes for a very clear set of dependencies, when diagnosing problems you’ve got just one place to look. You can scale by adding more such boxes, each being self-contained. Clarity has a lot of operational value.
2. But, it’s likely that the portal or the services will have different resource requirements, hence you are scaling (say) the portal when the services are not using much resource. Hence you have more copies of something portal or service than you strictly need. This may have considerable costs. Examples:
   • Licence costs. Suppose you have 10 copies of portal but really only needed 5, then that’s 5 licences wasted.
   • Memory consumption. Suppose there’s a fixed overhead in getting the services (or portal) up irrespective of load demands (think caching or database connections) then you are paying that cost for the un-needed instances
   • Back-end costs. Your services may connect to enterprise systems, eg a database. Each connection costs resources on the back-end. If you have un-needed instances you pay needless costs.

3.Platform tuning. You may need to tune the platform differently for your portal and the services. This issue is more noticable when considering whether to co-locate the database too.