[CentOS] Load balancing...

Fri Mar 4 01:01:35 UTC 2011
James A. Peltier <jpeltier at sfu.ca>

----- Original Message -----
| 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
| 
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While not CentOS or even GNU/Linux related you can also have a look at OpenBSDs relayd.  See

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=relayd&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

-- 
James A. Peltier
IT Services - Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-6573
Fax     : 778-782-3045
E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices
          http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier