The Alfresco System Receiver (ASR) is just another instance of the Alfresco Server. It is also known as headless Alfresco, as the Web Client UI is not used. Also some features such as CIFS, WebDAV, FTP, and NFS are disabled.
The ASR allows a web project being authored in one Alfresco server instance to be deployed to another separate instance of Alfresco. ASR provides the ability to leverage search, versioning, and dynamic queries (via web scripts) within a live server environment—thereby making the content available for dynamic queries by basically any web technology (PHP, Python, J2EE, ASP .NET, AJAX, Flash, Cold Fusion, and so on). This provides ultimate flexibility in what and how the content is displayed on a page.
Note
From Alfresco 3.2 version onwards ASR is replaced by the client-side WCM Deployment Service and receiver-side AVM Deployment Target.
The WCM deployment service is the staging (sending) side of WCM deployment. The AVM Deployment Target is a target which is registered with the receiving side of deployment. By default its target name is "avm", although of course this can be changed through configuration. The AVM Deployment Target receives a deployment from an Alfresco WCM authoring environment and puts the content into an AVM store where it can be used to support a dynamic website.
You can configure the WCM deployment service by editing the settings in the<tomcatHome>/shared/classes/extension/deployment-service-context.xml file.
To assist with cases where files are being deployed over a network with high latency, the deployment client is multi-threaded and sends several files at once. By default, five sends are done in parallel.
From 3.2 Enterprise onwards you can set the deployment.service.numberOfSendingThreads property in the alfresco-global.properties file.
Deployment is controlled through the Action Service which controls how many deployments happen in parallel. If you need to deploy to many servers, then you may need to increase the number of deployments in parallel. But if you run out of processing power or memory, then you may need to reduce this setting.
From 3.2 Enterprise onwards you can set the following properties in the alfresco-global.properties file.
deployment.service.corePoolSize=2 deployment.service.maximumPoolSize=3
The AVM Deployment Target is a target that is registered with the receiving side of deployment. By default its target name is "avm".
The ASR names the live and stores the same as the staging store. This is fine in most cases except for where the ASR is used to deploy to the same machine that has the authoring instance. In this case, the ASR attempts to avoid a circular dependency (or overwriting the source) by appending the destination store name with '-live'.
In order to have consistency between deploying to a local instance and deploying to a remote instance, the AVM deployment target always names live stores with the '-live' prefix. For example, if your web project name is "cignex" (on Staging Server), then on the ASR destination Alfresco server, the name of the web project would be "cignex-live".