Nginx changing settings on the fly?

[Jonathan Matthews]

On 26 July 2013 22:18, YesThatGuy <nginx-forum at nginx.us> wrote:
> We're currently using CrossRoads for our load balancing needs and are
> evaluating a switch to Nginx. We are excited by the existence of a
> pacemaker/heartbeat ocf script. But one of the needs that we have is that
> our web servers have somewhat volatile load averages. Some hits cause a
> tremendous amount of processing, most others cause very little.
>
> The nginx config option "weight" allows you to balance how much load to
> preferentially give to which host, but can this option be changed in value
> without restarting nginx? I would want to default to "1" and then have each
> logic server announce to the load balancer what weight should be used, in
> short intervals.

I'd be looking at HAProxy for this. You can update weights of existing
servers on the fly via a unix socket. Of course, your runtime state
then diverges from your on-disk startup state, but that sounds like
the mechanism you're looking for.

J