Hi All,
Can anyone help me hash out how best to load balance a website that is getting considerable traffic? In the past I only have experience with BigIP where you have a load balancing device that keeps track and send traffic to the best server possible at the time. This was a proprietary system that I think was something Dell rebranded.
Right now, the whole site is is 400gb of video, HTML5, Apache, PHP, MySQL, runs on a single box with 16gb of RAM and mirrored /var/www/html (2x1tb raid level drives). I have a Comcast 50/10 connection, 5 statics and I am seeing about 125 unique visitors a day. The site runs fine, but in anticipation of more traffic as well as a learning experience I would like to load balance.
Obviously I need a second server just like the one it is running on now. I will probably spec something out that is capable of 32gb of RAM.
What about a dedicated load balancing device? What specs should this be? How much RAM, HD, processor? It is sufficient to buy something with a GB NIC and say 4gb of RAM? Can one go slower but more RAM, small HD? I don't really quite know how intensive a task this decision making process is for the load balancer..
Right now, as example, I have an Untangle Firewall and it runs on a old AMD with 2gb RAM, GB NIC and it seems to do just fine.
My local computer store has several P4 2.8ghz with 2GB of RAM for like $99....
Can anyone enlighten me on specs, proper setup, caveats....?
-Jason