How well does the Document Conversion Server scale?
The key to our Carrier Grade Conversion Engine architecture is our ‘hub’ conversion process, where the ‘hub’ queues up the jobs, and separate slave computers handle the conversion. This results in a very scalable solution, in that if you need more horsepower, all you need do is add additional computers to the network. This also means the web server does not get bogged down handling conversions, and instead concentrates on serving web pages while a separate machine handles conversions. Conversion of a Word document requires tremendous resources. To complicate matters further, most applications (including WORD) do not handle multiple simultaneous conversions well. Since computers are relatively cheap, it’s a lot easier to pass off the conversion process to a slave machine than it is to debug multiple conversions all on the same machine. A conservatively-built slave can convert a 3-page Word document in approximately 10 seconds, of which 4 seconds is spent loading Word; if Word is already
