Viability of nginx instead of hardware load balancer?

[Gena Makhomed]

On Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 17:03:58, David Murphy wrote:

DM> DSL was only an example of  one distro
DM> ( good  for testing to prove a concept).

this is just wasting of time, no?

build and test on legacy 2.4.x kernel and after doing it -
again build and test on 2.6.x kernel before production use.

make production high traffic load-balancer
on legacy 2.4.x kernel - is not good idea.

DM> Also for no SPF, you would do the same thing I suggested with VM but with
DM> physical 1U boxes, were your network could provide the fail over, and you
DM> would simply have 2 very cheap nginx based load balancer
DM> so quick fail over if one node had an issue.

if use "very cheap hardware" for "high traffic load-balancer" -
very cheap hardware may have low reliability and very low performance.

absence of failures and absence of lags/overloads
IMHO has more priority over "hardware low price".

especially if in future load balancers
feel very high load under DDoS attacks.

===================================================================

On Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 23:01:04, David Murphy wrote:

>>Yes, that's a good idea. Is DSL the best distro for such things?

DM> Well not necessarily but it does have the smallest foot print, thus needing
DM> less on chip memory and lowering cost of  creating such an appliance, heck
DM> technically speaking you could get a  WRT-54G, turn off the wireless after
DM> installing  DD-WRT ( DSL variant), and compile  nginx into it. Would be an
DM> interesting proof of concept for sure.

===================================================================

WRT-54G has slow CPU, low RAM, and it is bad candidate for load balancer hardware.

using DSL( or DSL-N ) and WRT-54G as high traffic load-balancer
software and hardware is useless and harmful recommendations, IMHO.

but using for frontends modern hardware and OS allow use its
at least also for nginx caching in order to reduce
backends load and quantity, and so on...

-- 
Best regards,
 Gena