In my search scripts, I use the EXPORT tag to maintain many of my search criteria between searches. This works great in my development environment, however my production environment has 3 different servers, and my tables and indexes are replicated to each one them. I then do some round robin load balancing to share the load between them. The problem I am experiencing is that it is just not working. It would seem that the the search attributes exported in my scripts are lost when the search request goes to another server. This makes sense, however what I neeed to know is: Is that what is happening, and is maintaining all the search criteria in the querystring the only way to fix the problem?
Multi Server Load Balancing and remember search criteria
Multi Server Load Balancing and remember search criteria
Also, I know that using the EXPORT function is more efficient than maintaining all the search criteria in the querystring. How much more efficient is it? My search allows the user to search my tables by a number of different search attributes. I have more than 10 indexes on my table. For this reason I am actually worried about the querystring not being able to contain all the search criteria. Is it likely for me to create a querystring that is too big? Also, instead of replicating the data to all the servers, would it make more sense to partition certain portions of the data to different servers, and only hit the appropriate server when doing my queries, thus allowing me to use the EXPORT function.