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...