[lug] Load Balancer / Local Directors

[Peter Hutnick]

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On Monday 27 May 2002 07:24 pm, John King wrote:
> Has anyone or group worked with making a linux alternative to the very
> expensive Alteon Load Balancers or distributed directors ??

Load balancing is a black art.  In my experience you are best off designing 
things so that you don't need a load balancer.  If you simply can't do that 
I'd recommend a "real" load balancer.

You have to be into some pretty serious stuff to actually need a load balancer 
though.  You can usually do well by having a separate DB server, maybe an 
image server, etc.  IOW break up the work of serving /a/ web page among 
several systems instead of spreading requests among systems.  The difficulty 
of load balancing is managing sessions, keeping DBs synchronized, etc.  You 
avoid this by having servers dedicated to separate tasks.

- -Peter

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