Dual load balancer (one failsafe)?

[Alexander Staubo]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 6:52 AM, Floren Munteanu <nginx at yqed.com> wrote:
> What to do, use HaProxy or the built-in nginx balancer?

Stick with Nginx if you are already familiar with it and you are using
it for serving your PHP. There's no need to complicate things with yet
another new component. I think HAProxy is a much better load balancer,
but there are pros and cons to both approaches.

You might want to check out layer 4 load-balancing as an option. The
LVS project, of which Heartbeat is a part, also offers the IPVS
system, which can load-balance network traffic to multiple nodes at
the layer 4, ie. by distributing network traffic at the packet level.

This is simpler and more limited than the kind of fancy HTTP magic
that Nginx and HAProxy can do, but it's much faster since there no
proxying involved. Here's a howto (based on Heartbeat 2, which you
might want to avoid):

  http://www.novell.com/communities/node/4846/load-balancing-howto-lvs-ldirectord-heartbeat-2

All of this stuff requires Linux, by the way.

Alexander.