[CentOS] Load balancing...

[Brian Mathis]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Todd <slackmoehrle.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Brian,
> Thanks for all of the great words here. I appreciate the detail in your
> reply.
>>
>> OK, so what's good?  For my requirements, HAProxy is excellent.  It
>> handled sticky sessions well, performs monitoring of each host, allows
>> dynamic adding/removing of servers, as well as maintenance modes.
>> It's very easy to install and configure.  I'm using is as the backend
>> to apache that is acting as an SSL termination point.  It's been very
>> high performing for us and I know a lot of big sites use it as well.
>> The only question I would have with it is handling of video, as we
>> only use it for typical web traffic, just high bandwidth stuff like
>> that.
>>
>> Also, make sure any load balancer you have is redundant and has some
>> kind of failover, using something like pacemaker, heartbeat, etc...
>
> Can you outline a bit specs for building a homemade box to run HAProxy? The
> HAProxy site is very extensive, but I did not see ideal specs at a quick
> glance. I will read in depth this weekend.
> Minimal specs and they excellent specs if you have thoughts.. I really don't
> have an idea how intensive a task like this is. Nobody needs to log into the
> box, simply use the box for this purpose.
> -Jason

The servers I use were brand new Dell R610s as of 2 years ago, with
the lowest CPU I could get (dual core) and 8GB RAM (currently only
2.5GB used).  However, my site only handles a high load once in a
while, though I haven't seen any haproxy related problems with
performance.

I would start with low-end servers and then monitor and add as you
need to.  If you setup the redundancy right, you can even skimp on
things like dual power supplies, etc...