Well, I supposed the primary reason why I was hoping not to use them is they just don't make sense. The idea of load balancing to me is that my CURRENT traffic load would be evenly spread across the servers. In light of that concept, the whole idea of taking each user, lassoing them down, and tying them to one server just seems to fly in the face of evenly proportioned traffic. If 8 users logon to a site clustered in round robin fashion to two instances, and then the 4 on one server all log off that leaves 100% of remaining traffic bound to one and only one server. That just doesn't seem right. Why should my traffic 2 hours ago determine the server load now. (On our internal site the average session lasts all day long-- from when people come to work and log in, till when they go home and log off.)
We have had very poor load spread here with our current hardware load balancer which divides traffic up between 5 single instance installs of CF. Sticky sessions are enabled on the HW Load Balancer and somehow I think they might be to blame for some of the lop-sided traffic. For instance, right at this very moment according to my live SeeFusion stats one of my web servers has served 45% of all page hits today, and another server has only served 5%!! What the heck? So, when we decided to move to Enterprise, I thought GREAT now I can share sessions amongst the servers and never have to worry about our servers being lopsided again. But now, every problem I run into "enable sticky sessions" is the bloody answer! Enabling sticky sessions seems to completely undo pretty much all the good I was hoping to gain from replicating my session and letting the users jump from one server to another as they used the site. Of course, what frustrates be about BOTH are hardware balancer and a JRun cluster, is that they are not aware of things like CPU usage on the servers. They just keep round robining traffic as long as the server/instance is up regardless of how many other requests that server may still be churning through. I would definitely like suggestions on how to make our load balancing more aware. I know our hardware balancer (Foundry ServerIron) supports checking a hear-beat page, but to my understanding that only tells it that the application server is running-- not how busy it is. ~Brad -----Original Message----- From: Russ [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 1:33 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Targetting an instance Maybe I missed a part of the thread, but what exactly is the reason that you don't want to enable sticky sessions? Russ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Deploy Web Applications Quickly across the enterprise with ColdFusion MX7 & Flex 2 Free Trial http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:273765 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
