aurfalien at gmail.com wrote: > On Mar 3, 2011, at 3:43 PM, Todd wrote: >> >> 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. <snip> >> What about a dedicated load balancing device? What specs should this <snip> If you're talking a load-balancing appliance, they get pricey. When I was at AT&T a few years ago, for a small group, we got one from Radware (a competitor of F5, the Big Name), but it was still several thousand dollars. It worked quite well, btw (and if you are interested, I can contact the vendor engineer I worked with....) A warning: round robin can be problematical. At the same job, before we got the Radware box, we were going through IBM's WebSeal (part of the Tivoli suite). We went to upgrade one of four boxes from a perl website to php... and then discovered that the stupid thing did *not* do persistant connections, so someone would get (3 times out of 4) the perl, then it would 404 the next time, because it got the php, or vice versa. mark