[lug] Load Balancer / Local Directors

[rise]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Peter Hutnick wrote:

> 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.

If you're doing load-balancing of web servers (common, but not the only
reason) you might want to look at mod_backhand[0] for Apache.  I've never
used it, but a lot of people whose opinions I trust have been very
impressed.

    mod_backhand is project that allows seamless redirection of HTTP
    requests from one web server to another. This redirection can be
    used to target machines with under-utilized resources, thus
    providing fine-grained, per-request load balancing of web
    requests.


[0] http://www.backhand.org/

-- 
Jonathan Conway						      rise at knavery.net
history is paling & my surge protection failed, & so I FRIED
						- Concrete Blonde, "Fried"