The load balancing process indicated in this link :
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html
Is requiring two servers to work.
How can I adapt the described process to make it work with only one server ?
The entire point of load balancing is to equally split traffic over a number of servers. Implementing load balancing with one server would be completely missing the point and entirely useless.
Related
Hi I'm little confused about load balancer concept
I've read some articles about loadbalancer in nginx and from what I've understand is that the load balancer spread the request into multiple servers !
But i thought if one server is down another one is up and running (not simultaneously all server together)
and another thing is when request spread between servers what happen to static data like sessions and InMemory Database like RedisDB
I think i'm confused and missunderstood the loadbalancer mechanism
and from what I've understand is that the load balancer spread the request into multiple servers ! But i thought if one server is down another one is up and running (not simultaneously all server together)
As it comes from the name the goal of load balancer (LB) is to balance the load. As per wiki definition for example:
In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle.
To perform this task load balancer obviously need to have some monitoring over the resources, including liveness checks (so it can bring out of the rotation the failing servers/nodes). Ideally LB should work with stateless services (i.e. request could be routed to any of the servers supporting handling such request type) but that is not always the case due to multiple reasons, for example in ASP.NET in case of non-distributed session requests should have been routed to servers which handled the previous request from the session, which could have been handled with so called sticky session/cookie.
and another thing is when request spread between servers what happen to static data like sessions and InMemory Database like RedisDB
It is not very clear what is the question here. As I mentioned before ideally you will want to have stateless services which will use some shared datastore (s) to handle the requests, so if request comes for any server/node it can load all the needed data to handle it.
So in short when request comes to LB it selects one of the servers based on some algorithm (round robin, resource based, sharding, response time based, etc.) and send this request to this server so in theory based on the used approach sequential requests from the same source can hit different nodes/servers (so basically this is one of the ways to horizontally scale your application).
I actually found my answer in nginx doc page
Short answer is IP-Hash mechanism
Nginx doc word :
Please note that with round-robin or least-connected load balancing, each subsequent client’s request can be potentially distributed to a different server. There is no guarantee that the same client will be always directed to the same server.
If there is the need to tie a client to a particular application server — in other words, make the client’s session “sticky” or “persistent” in terms of always trying to select a particular server — the ip-hash load balancing mechanism can be used.
With ip-hash, the client’s IP address is used as a hashing key to determine what server in a server group should be selected for the client’s requests. This method ensures that the requests from the same client will always be directed to the same server except when this server is unavailable.
To configure ip-hash load balancing, just add the ip_hash directive to the server (upstream) group configuration:
upstream myapp1 {
ip_hash;
server srv1.example.com;
server srv2.example.com;
server srv3.example.com;
}
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/load_balancing.html
I am currently evaluating CrateDB and came up this question. I know that CrateDB proudly claims itself to be a no-config database. So, is there automatic load balancing? Or is it possible to add a load balancer before the dabase?
After browsing the web for a bit I found this howto indicating there is no automatic load balancing in CrateDB. Is that correct?
yes, load balancing happens automatically:
the client libraries can be configured with multiple nodes and then do round-robin scheduling
if you pass a query to a node - the execution of the query will happen distributed in the cluster anyhow.
We have two apache servers for load balancing. Whenever I upload a file on one server. Using load balancing concepts, will it get copied into other server.
Do these two server maintain replica of each other?
If not, how to do that? How to maintain the replica of one another servers?
If Yes, what configuration is required.
Thanks for help.
Load balancing balances the requests that are sent to a load balancer to the server that actually answers them.
Handling files that are uploaded to one server is on the application level - it must be handled by your application - e.g. through storing it in a location that all nodes can access (filesystem, database).
There's nothing that tomcat or an appserver can do for you - because they don't know what needs to be replicated and what doesn't. They don't know if something that you uploaded will be processed and can be forgotten, or if it will be stored for later download.
We have WCF service X: deployed on server A and Server B, host address:
http://127.0.0.1:8777/ServiceX/
And we load balance the two servers. We accesss the service via http://myappserver/ServiceX
We need to use per-session mode, and we set [reliable sessions] as true:
We don't find any issue till now based on testing. But the below linked MSDN article says that Do not use reliable sessions for Load Balancing with the WSHttp Binding? Please can someone give more details? Thanks a lot.
WCF Load Balancing http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms730128.aspx
Reliable Messaging means all your messages from your established client reach the same endpoint behind any intermediaries like routers and load balancers.
Load balancing means your calls will be distributed across all nodes as the load balancer sees fit.
Those two goals are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other, not both.
I have not had time to try this myself yet, but I found this old blog entry (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/drnick/2007/07/13/sticky-sessions/):
This division according to groups would allow a feature like reliable messaging to work because the same server would be used to process all of the messages in the reliable session. The feature that this division method represents is typically called “sticky sessions” or some other phrase for affinitization in the load balancer.
Given that you mention that your firewall supports sticky sessions, I suspect/hope you will be fine.
I've written a simple server application which will run distributed on several machines.
My question is how does a network load balancer works, in general?
I've heard of round-robin and other algorithms, but what I haven't got answer to is how does the process really goes? In socket terms.
The client connects to one of the load balancer machines, asks for a "free-to-connect-to" server and simply connects to it?
That's the simpliest way I can think of.
.. or, does it use the load balancer as a proxy (that implies that all the NBs must be always connected to the application servers, and data is transferred through them)?
It's more of a general question. How would you do this?
Thank you all!
There are several different ways to load balance an application. Some are physical devices that sit between your router and the servers; some are software based with a bit of code that runs on each of the load balanced devices.
Microsoft has load balancing built into Windows which is all software based. It's pretty good and easy to set up.
However, I'll cover the physical route.
There are several algorithms here, but the main one is Round Robin with an option for "sticky" sessions. Sticky in this case means that the load balancer will try to keep a history of clients and forward requests from the same client to the same machine. This means the load balancer needs to keep a list of clients and where it directed those clients. Depending on cache size, clients may fall off the list and on future requests they may be forwarded to a different server.
Round Robin is a pretty simple idea. For each request that comes in send it to the next server in the list. More complicated algorithms might take into account how many requests go to a particular server and how long are those requests taking; then try to rebalance new requests to favor faster servers. This part is complicated though.