In the UK we are still trying to understand when to move to relying on the WMS and how many we require. What are the experiences of other countries/regions?
Here is some background from a GridPP meeting today:
"The RAL WMS lcgwms01 (SL3 host with gLite-WMS-2.4.9-0 and glite-LB-2.3.5-0) became heavily loaded on 22nd and user throughput suffered as a result. The underlying problem was not understood as the service returned to normal without a clear intervention required. This prompted SL to comment on WMS and RB availability in the UK. He noted 5 RBs (3 RAL; 1 Glasgow and 1 IC). He was only aware of the 1 WMS instance at RAL. As of today, the default server in Glasgow is a gLite 3.1 WMS instance (RB to be removed at the end of July and possibly replaced with another WMS). RAL maintains one test instance on SL4 – to be moved to production after further testing. IC has PPS-glite-WMS.i386 3.1.8-1. This WMS is stable with 20-30,000 jobs a day not causing a problem. NGS has an unadvertised WMS hosted at RAL. Grid Ireland run a WMS and has seen “quite a few issues” while working with users to get their apps working via it. Throughput performance of the WMS is good.
Stephen recently noticed that YAIM will soon be configuring UIs to work with service discovery (WMS and LBs will be discoverable through the information system using appropriate UI commands): https://savannah.cern.ch/bugs/?31211.”