Don't use Pound for load balancing

http://blog.emmettshear.com/post/2008/03/03/Dont-use-Pound-for-load-balancing

by emmett • 18 years ago

26 10 18 years ago

blog.emmettshear.com

michelson012• 18 years ago

until fair proxy balancer is production ready (http://www.brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-bala...), i really like nginx in front of haproxy in front of the mongrels

nginx => haproxy => mongrels

staunch• 18 years ago

Doesn't hashing on a cookie from each server give you fairness?

http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamRequestHashModu...

michelson012• 18 years ago

i prefer a proxy balancer that is smart enough to know when the back-end servers (mongrels in this case) are busy or not, and smart enough that it doesn't send requests to back-end servers that are down (i'm looking at you, apache mod_proxy_balancer)

cstejerean• 18 years ago

I'm not entirely certain I buy the argument that software which has lower CPU and memory utilization on average is better (on the server).

The server is sitting there with all the ram and CPU and 2% or 20% doesn't make a difference if there is nothing else to take advantage of that other 98 to 80%. The only thing that matters is the ability to handle peaks (and being reliable).

You want server software that is optimized around the worst case scenario (unless you want to run your software on servers with little resources in which case it's the other way around).

So if nginx can handle higher loads than pound, it's a better load balancer. But if it keeps my servers at 2% most of the time but does worse under high loads then it's no good.

Now I wouldn't use Pound either for load balancing and I believe nginx should be better, but the data in this article doesn't really support that argument.

emmett2• 18 years ago

Of course the evidence is far from conclusive without more data. But Pound has had terrible performance so far, and based on what data I have nginx is an order of magnitude more efficient.

nickb2• 18 years ago

Emmett, what tool did you use to collect the data and make the graph?

emmett2• 18 years ago

That's a graph straight from Ganglia (http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/), which is what we use to monitor our servers.

nickb2• 18 years ago

Thank you!

vegai• 18 years ago

Does anyone have experience in using Swiftiply in a production environment?

mwmanning• 18 years ago

I've been really happy using apache2 in front of a mongrel cluster. Apache serves up static files and load balances requests to the mongrels. Can anyone give me a good reason why I should be using something other than apache on a production server?

Don't use Pound for load balancing

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