In most environments, when you are load balancing, you will have a large amount of users, and thus the traffic will be proportionally distributed even with sticky sessions. It seems that you are running high intensity web applications with few users. In this scenario, it's possible that traffic will be lopsided. If this affects user performance for you, then perhaps sticky sessions are not the answer.
Personally, I would set up a shared directory that both servers can write their CFCHARTS to as has been suggested by other members. If you want fairer load balancing that takes into account CPU utilization, perhaps you can set up a health check page that returns the CPU utilization (which doesn't seem to be very easy, but you can return the number of currently running requests, or number of current sessions, etc), and have ServerIron distribute the requests based on those values. I haven't personally tried this, but I'm guessing it should be possible. Russ > -----Original Message----- > From: Brad Wood [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 3:01 PM > To: CF-Talk > Subject: RE: Targetting an instance > > 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 > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Create robust enterprise, web RIAs. Upgrade & integrate Adobe Coldfusion MX7 with Flex 2 http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJP Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:273774 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
