Fair Proxy Balancer

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

On Feb 6, 2008, at 10:44 AM, David Pratt wrote:

> Hi. Both haproxy and lvs have setups that are more involved for  
> sure. haproxy 1.3 has more balancing algorithms than 1.2. I have  
> seen patches that provide least connection balancing for 1.2 also.  
> lvs is what I believe to be 'the' mainstream balancer but needs to  
> be compiled into the linux kernel - it as not as portable and simple  
> as incorporating the fair proxy balancer as a result. Interested in  
> Rob's experience to determine no of servers. Many thanks Grzegorz.
>
> Regards,
> David



Hey David-

	We're running the fair balancer on about 100 servers with good  
success. We had some issues with the fair balancer in lower load  
situations only sending requests to the first backend instead of doing  
a round robin when under lower load, this was causing the single  
backend to become overloaded. The latest version Grzegorz has just  
pushed to his git repo works much better in all the situations we have  
put it under.

	We run LVS at the edge of our clusters and have LVS balance to nginx  
on each VM with nginx doing fair balancing directly to the mongrels  
and it is working great. Much fewer moving parts then throwing haproxy  
in the mix. In my benchmarks having haproxy between nginx and the  
mongrels was s lower since there was one more level of indirection. So  
having nginx serving static content and fair balancing to the backends  
is ideal for us.


Cheers-
- Ezra Zygmuntowicz
-- Founder & Software Architect
-- ezra at engineyard.com
-- EngineYard.com