Content delivery network issues

When adding a SilverStripe installation to a content delivery network, or a grid server (such as MediaTemple's (gs) Grid Service), some additional problems present themselves. These are listed below.

Please update this page if you have any more information.

Note: This may or may not be specific to MediaTemple's (gs) Grid Service offering. Email Matt (matt [at] silverstripe.com) for more information.

The grid service I used only shared a number of directories, and not the entire filesystem. One of the directories that wasn't shared was /tmp, which means that every server had to generate (or re-generate in the case of running ?flush=1) the template cache. This led to SilverStripe loading very slowly quite often, and sometimes (when you retrieve a page from a server which has already cached the files) loading at normal speed.

My solution was to move the silverstripe-cache directory out of /tmp and into the domains/domain-name.com directory that was shared between all servers. This meant that I had to hack sapphire/core/Core.php to allow me to set a TEMP_FOLDER directory that wasn't in the web-root (for security reasons), but still outside of /tmp.

There's a ticket to make the temp folder a little easier to change here: http://open.silverstripe.com/ticket/2121