Prod Arch Improvements

The Alpha production site has seen lots of improvement the last week or so, as I try to get it closer to what I would consider a ready-to-launch feature set.

The biggest change has been an upgrade to a clustered architecture with multiple servers handling the site traffic. It was enabled by adding a specialized server instance that sits in front of all the regular site request-handling servers, and acts as a reverse proxy to them. It provides load balancing, session-to-server stickiness, and automatic failover functionality. The new architecture is also such that it's relatively easy to add additional servers, even on separate machines (in fact, it's better that way), if the site traffic level is causing too much load on the machines or too high of an average request-response latency.

Lots of other little changes, including a move of the static file serving off the main backend servers and on to a dedicated (and I believe caching) frontend server, provided by our hosting provider.

Also improvements and fixes to the subscription and PayPal-related code. And the configuration subsystem. And lots of little code refactors and directory cleanups, as I move further along the spectrum from the "just get stuff working" mindset to the "get stuff launchable and realistically manageable afterward" mindset.

Mike