# Multiple production servers with different roles?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multiple-production-servers-with-different-roles/187066>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 16, 2010, 3:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multiple-production-servers-with-different-roles/187066 "2010-04-16T15:04:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![trevor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/258eb7/32.png) [@trevor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/trevor)\
**Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 3:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multiple-production-servers-with-different-roles/187066/1 "2010-04-16T15:04:35Z")

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We’ve got an app dealing with a lot of heavy disk i/o (\>1GB uploads,  
lots of processing, etc.). Most of the app runs great on a few  
frontend servers in a xen environment but disk i/o is always a  
bottleneck, so we’re offloading all the heavy stuff to a physical  
asset server.

The asset server would of course serve static files (per the  
environment option already in Rails), but do a little more than that -  
the entire app stack would be there but only a handful of controllers  
and operations would be available in that environment. It would  
communicate with the same MySQL database as all the other servers.

Question is: has anyone dealt with multiple servers that have  
significantly different roles, and what is the best way to configure  
these? My first sense was to use separate environment configs (two  
production environments in this case), but have them share the same  
database.

Any feedback would be appreciated.