On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Todd slackmoehrle.lists@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...