Load Balanceing Recommendations

[Michael Conlen]

On Jan 31, 2005, at 5:11 PM, Nick Pavlica wrote:

> All,
>   I  have been searching for a load balancing tool/method for managing
> the traffic going to my web servers(http(s)).  I have found a number
> of tools/methods out there, but haven't found any that stand out as
> the "Common Solution" to this task on FreeBSD (I may be overlooking
> the obvious :)).  I'm currently testing on FreeBSD 4.11 and 5.3 on
> x86.
>
> - What method/tool do you use or recommend based on your production 
> experience?

I've used two methods that have worked well. One is to use a FreeBSD or 
OpenBSD as a router and use PF to do the load balancing. The downside 
with this method is that it doesn't sense when a server is down and 
remove it from the pool of servers. I also haven't done weighted load 
balancing with this method so I can't evaluate it.

The second method I've used is using a Foundry switch with a load 
balancer built in to it. This is nice when 1) you don't want to use a 
FreeBSD or OpenBSD system as a router and 2) you want it to do health 
checks to remove a down system from the pool automatically. It works 
really well, the downside being the cost.

--
Michael Conlen