Master/Satellite Architecture

In very high volume situations, such as Internet top-100 sites, it is possible to receive very heavy traffic, on the order of tens of thousands of votes per minute or more. In these situations, ViewsFlash can be configured as a truly distributed, fully scalable system.

Using a load-balancing technique, such as DNS load balancing, submitted votes are routed to a bank of ViewsFlash servers. These servers count votes in parallel and either redirect a visitor's browser to a dynamic publishing system which generates the response page or else compose a response page locally. In both cases, full parallelism is achieved.

In order to provide real-time results, the ViewsFlash servers transmit their results to a Master ViewsFlash server periodically, rather than on every vote. This Master server aggregates the results of the Satellite ViewsFlash servers and maintains the authoritative copy of live results. The Master is also responsible for storing data gathered from the satellites.

If visitors' browsers are redirected to a dynamic page, that page is responsible for querying the Master server periodically, such as once per second, for latest results. If the satellite ViewsFlash boxes are responsible for composing results, they periodically perform this service themselves.

Finally, back-end systems can query the Master ViewsFlash server to display results on live television, for example, using both HTML and XML.

Complete configuration and planning assistance is available from Cogix.