Note – where BRWS appears we refer to either BRWS or BRWS4J.
There are two basic decisions to make when deploying the BRWS: 1) which server(s) should run the BRWS, and 2) where should the BRWS store the collected statistics.
Typically you only need to run the BRWS on one server, regardless of how many web servers are used for your site. The BRWS is a light-weight, highly optimized process that requires very little system resources. This provides for efficient, scalable, and centralized statistics collection and storage.
Figure 1 below depicts deployment for a site hosted on one production web server. In this scenario the BRWS is installed on the same server as the web server.
Figure 2 depicts deployment for a site hosted across multiple production servers. In this scenario one of the production servers is designated to run the BRWS. The other servers will use the services of the BRWS running on that designated server.
In both scenarios only one instance of the BRWS is run, and this one instance handles all statistics collection and storage for all servers.
For sites with very heavy traffic you may choose to dedicate one or more servers specifically to running the BRWS without any responsibilities for serving your web site pages. In this configuration all web servers use the BRWS on the dedicated server(s), and no BRWS is required to run on any production web servers. This is depicted in Figure 3. In the case where multiple dedicated BRWS servers are deployed, you can easily load balance the statistics collection across the various BRWS servers.
Figure 1: Typical BrowserHawk Reports deployment for a site run on one production web server. The BRWS runs on the same server as the web server.
Figure 2: Typical BrowserHawk Reports deployment for a site run across multiple production web servers. One server is designated to run the BRWS and all other web servers use the services of the one BRWS.
Figure 3: BrowserHawk Reports deployment for a heavy traffic site requiring dedicated resources. Although not pictured here, you can also add additional dedicated BRWS servers and load balance the requests to each.
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