HAProxy, NGINX and Rails anyone?

[Redd Vinylene]

Is there any chance nginx' load balancing will ever be as good as haproxy?

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Brian Gupta <brian.gupta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Patrick Viet <patrick.viet at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes : don't use haproxy.
>> Why would you want to use haproxy over nginx when nginx can already do your
>> balancing ?
>> Sure, haproxy is a little faster than nginx, but if nginx is there anyway,
>> just use it.
>> That will definitely be lighter.
>
> Nginx's load balancing algorithm's is fairly simplistic. If you are
> going to be seeing any sort of sustained traffic, and are running with
> more than 2 or three backend mongrels, Rails can really benefit from
> haproxy's ability to limit connections to a single connection per back
> end rails/mongrel instance.  (Fro those that don't know each backend
> Rails instance is a single threaded app. So they can only handle one
> web request at at time. If more are sent the go into a block IO wait
> state.)
>
> Where this really helps is when a web request that initiates a 10-30
> second database query. The slow web request isn't gonna stall any
> other web traffic as haproxy won't send any additional traffic to that
> webserver instance until that request either times out or is
> fulfilled.
>
> In addition for those cases when you have bursts of traffic that
> temporarily overwhelm your backend, Haproxy queues those overflow
> connections on the front end and then drains them off to the backend
> mongrels in the most efficient and expedient manner. (So the end user
> experience is the best).
>
> That all said, I still run with nginx in front of haproxy to intercept
> statics, and do SSL offload.
>
> Cheers,
> Brian
>
> P.S. - It all really depends. You might want to start with just
> haproxy, if it is a small internal site, but if you plan to see any
> level of internet scale traffic, you are really gonna want to add
> haproxy into the mix.
>
>>
>> Patrick
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Redd Vinylene <reddvinylene at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi there!
>>>
>>> I'm working on my first HAProxy, NGINX and Rails setup, and I was
>>> wondering if anybody could help me improve my configuration:
>>>
>>> http://pastie.org/242411
>>>
>>> I wish to keep things as simple as possible, but from what I hear, I'm
>>> lacking quite a few "exciting" options ;)
>>>
>>> -- Redd Vinylene http://www.home.no/reddvinylene
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> - Brian Gupta
>
> http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/
>
> http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OpenSolaris_New_User_FAQ
>