AEM Dispatcher configuration

Question

Happend to see an interesting presentation in Slide Share on AEM Dispatcher. I'm new to to Dispatcher configuration. I have doubt on one of the slides which shows a generic deployment architecture :

1. This Slide shows an one-to-one relationship between publish and dispatchers ie. one specific dispatcher is associated with a specific publisher only. Is this figure represents a real use case? Is it possible for a particular dispatcher to cache content from more than one publisher?

Answer 1

Ans of your first question: Yes....I have worked on a project where Publisher-Dispatcher one to one mapping is there(3 dispatcher,3 publisher) & that site is serving a huge number of request per day.

Ans of your second question: Yes...You can use one particular dispatcher for caching content from multiple publisher.

Answer 2

Below is the configuration snippet to add multiple publishers to a single dispatcher.

        /renders
        {
            /render0
            {
                /hostname "<host1>"
                /port "<port>"
            }
            /render1
            {
                /hostname "<host2>"
                /port "<port>"
            }
        }

Answer 3

Dispatcher can be used as a

1, load balancing (configure one dispatcher with multiple publish instances) or 2, one to one mapping (one dispatcher with single publisher).

Caching is possible in both the setups.

We use option 2 when we go for automation of tasks(Zero down time deployment).