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Simple DIY Linux/BSD based Network Balancers?

Posted by Cliff on from the keeping-it-all-on-an-even-keel dept.

millisa asks: "I've been looking into options for inexpensive web based load balancing services for both Apache and IIS based web servers. There are plenty of commercial products out there that claim to do the job, but they are often too pricey, offer too many features, or are unreliable. I have lost the small amount of confidence I had in the MS based NLB services and do not like the idea of running multiple services on the same system anyways. I would like to build one (or more) simple front end load balancing Linux (or BSD) servers to direct traffic to the back-end systems if possible. I have seen mention of implementations based off of the Linux Router Project or the global load balancing oriented Eddie. What approaches are other geeks out there using for their LAN load balancing needs? I am especially interested in implementations that can maintain state (ie, handle sessions) as well as do some form of request inspection (so as to redirect those pesky web spiders to their own playground so a live user has the best web experience)." It's been long enough since the last time this came up, so lets revisit this question and touch upon the new solutions that have come up since 1999.

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Try mod_backhand. by Mordant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It just works:

    http://www.backhand.org/

    Or, failing that, go buy a Cisco CSS11500-series box for lots of $$$.

    ;>

  2. Something like RAID0 but for networks... by man_ls · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm going out on a limb here, not knowing a lot about networking or Linux, or RAID for that matter.

    My understanding of (2-disk) RAID0 is that blocks are written alternating between drives. A simple shell script or very simple program should be able to simply alternate connections...However, as everyone knows, just because the number of connections are equal doesn't mean the loads are the same. There'd need to be checking for which one has more slots left, which has a higher workload, etc.

    Maybe SNMP would come into play here somewhere?

  3. Pound by mwr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Pound is a simple http/https load balancer that's been announced fairly frequently on the Zope mailing list. It appears to be very small, runs diskless and chrooted, and handles back-end servers dropping off and coming back.