Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Web Server Load Balancing

Web Server Load Balancing:
Load balancing becomes important if your traffic volume becomes too great for either your server or network connection or both. Multiple options are available for load balancing.
  • DNS round-robin: Discussed above, this uses DNS to point users to random server in a list of appropriate servers. This spreads the load among the servers in the list.
  • Use a Linux Virtual Server to Create a Load Balance Cluster. See next section below.
  • Run a reverse proxy. See nginx ("engine X"). From a single external internet network connection, route http, smtp, imap or pop3 traffic to various servers on an internal network. Results are pushed back to the nginx proxy for routing to the internet (no caching).
  • Run the Apache httpd web server module "mod_proxy" to offload processing of dynamic content to another web server. This acts as a reverse proxy, routing external traffic to various servers on an internal network.

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