Geographic Proxy Bandwidth Usage

[Cliff Wells]

On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 12:42 -0400, ktwalrus wrote:
> This is probably a stupid question, but when I use nginx to proxy and
> HTTP request to a server in another geographic location, does the HTTP
> response go directly to the requester's IP address or does it route
> back through the nginx proxy server?

It goes back through the proxy.  It would seem rather odd to your
browser to request something from a server and suddenly get a response
from some other random server, wouldn't it?

> I'm getting ready to split my site into two locations (West Coast and
> East Coast of the US) and I want to redirect requests to the closest
> geographic server, but don't want the bandwidth for the response to go
> through the original request server.

You'd have to redirect, or use some other method of geographic load
distribution method such as DNS, for example: 

http://www.ultradns.com/solutions/traffic.html
http://edgedirector.com/

I don't use either of these services, so I'm not recommending them in
any way, other than to the extent that they do what you need.

> I think the bandwidth from the response server would be direct to the
> requester and not the request server, but I just want to make sure.
> Otherwise, geographic load serving woulldn't be very useful.

It isn't terribly useful in the scenario you seem to be suggesting.

Cliff

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