Robert Peake has a new posting on his blog today about a preview for his next article in the International PHP Magazine - the topic: Farming PHP.

I'm planning to tap my experience architecting and building scalable web server farms for PHP/MySQL applications to bring you an overview of the issues involved. Combined with the forthcoming issue on Enterprise PHP Coding Standards, this should flesh out some of my thinking and experience implementing PHP solutions for business-critical applications.

Some of the issues I'm considering tackling in my "Farming PHP" article include: Load Balancing versus Round-Robin DNS, Web Log Aggregation, Leveraging MySQL master/slave replication, "Sticky" load balancing sessions, Using shared filesystems, and much, much more

This would be one heck of an article, though I can't imagine it all being in one piece. To really cover the topics needed "correctly", you'd almost need a series just to squeeze it all in. I'm glad that he's thinking this way, though. There's not really that much information out there on getting a PHP/MySQL application set up in a farm in the "business-critical applications" that are showing up more and more...