[CentOS] Load balancing...

Thu Mar 3 23:43:55 UTC 2011
Todd <slackmoehrle.lists at gmail.com>

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20110303/24ffa4ff/attachment-0004.html>