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 supports clustered form servers for both high availability, load balancing and fault tolerance. The software can be installed and configured either as a stand-alone single form server or as a cluster of form servers behind an a load balancer.

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NOTE that only certain version include clustering. Please refer to the Release Notes for details.

A Form Server Cluster is instrumental in heavy load scenarios where a single form server cannot handle the load alone. Clustering also enables fault tolerance should one node fail for either design time or use mode forms. If one form server is shutdown the form instances automatically get transferred to another running form server node.

 supports clusters running under either Apache web servers or Oracle Web Logic servers. This chapter details how to enable a  cluster running under an Apache web server.

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Configure Tomcat Form Servers

The firsts first step is to install the  software on each machine that will become a node in your cluster. In order to provide scalability and fault tolerance it's most likely that each form server node will run on a separate physical machines - a distributed cluster. However it is possible to install two nodes on the same physical machine. This documentation covers both scenarios.

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Search <frevvo-home>/frevvo/tomcat/config/server.xml to locate the <Cluster> element. Uncomment the <Cluster> element. Before you your edits the server.xml contains the <!-- characters before and --> characters after the many lines that constitute the <Cluster> element:

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  • retry (default 60secs) - "Connection pool worker retry timeout in seconds. If the connection pool worker to the backend server is in the error state, Apache will not forward any requests to that server until the timeout expires. This enables to shut down the backend server for maintenance, and bring it back online later. A value of 0 means always retry workers in an error state with no timeout."
  • ping (not set by default)- "Ping property tells the web server to send a CPING request on ajp13 connection before forwarding a request. The parameter is the delay in seconds to wait for the CPONG reply. This features feature has been added to avoid problem problems with hung and busy Tomcat's and require ajp13 ping/pong support which has been implemented on Tomcat 3.3.2+, 4.1.28+ and 5.0.13+. This will increase the network traffic during the normal operation which could be an issue, but it will lower the traffic in case some of the cluster nodes are down or busy. Currently this has an effect only for AJP. By adding a postfix of ms the delay can be also set in milliseconds."

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If a form is in use when a designer edits that form to add/remove/modify fields, as usual this creates a new form version but the form currently in use remains at the original version. The form user is not disrupted and continues to use the current form instance until the submit the formthe form is submitted. However if the cluster node running this form instance fails, when the form instance is reinstantiated on another cluster node it gets updated to the new form version. The user will see a session expiration error message.

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