*nix dudes: Because several clients running IIS webservers (supposedly) are expecting a tons of traffic soon, I'd like to look into various *nix-related (i.e. free!) solutions that I might use to effectively deal with the carnage.
Over the past few weeks, I've been working a lot with F5's BigIP, which has some incredibly cool features for properly filtering / load balacing OSI layers four through seven. The problem with their solution(s) is the price: every single cool feature after that is a software module that costs a ton of money. >From what I heard from one their SEs, their OS is basically a hacked up version of Red Hat 7 or something, so why not build an OSS ver? For something simple like load balancing, I suppose that i could just use Pound. For caching, I have options like squid cache, etc. What other open source solutions might I want to start investigating? On a somewhat-related note, what stress testing tools can I use to see what a webserver's response time is? It's tools like this that will hopefully help me determine other n-tier solutions I need to think about. (Yesterday I played with Siege. It blasts a website with a whole bunch of traffic and then reports back your response time.) Roger
