On our systems we just rename that "alteoncheck.txt" file to "alteoncheck_DOWN.txt" when we're going to bring a server down (causing a 404 error for the health check, which stops all new requests), it effectively does the same thing you describe without the hassle of writing a handler. And yes it is very nice in that it's easily automated...
So, yes, it would be very nice to have a graceful shutdown, but it's not necessarily high priority for those who have some sort of load balancer box (not round robin DNS ;) because there are other relatively simple ways to achieve the same effect... Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Ho" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On a more load balancer specific note, Alteons (and some other load > balancers) use the concept of a health check URL. Our Alteons are > configured for example to check for a specific URL (for example, the > Alteon might do a "GET alteoncheck.txt HTTP/1.0" every 2 seconds). > > I had a plan originally to write a handler that accepts requests for this > heartbeat check... on some signal (a particular request? an OS signal?) it > would start returning an error for the heartbeat check case, but keep > servicing all other requests as normal. Eventually, the Alteon would > decide that that machine was bad, and the number of connections would fall > to zero; it would then be safe to take the server out of rotation. > > The benefit of this scenario is that you don't have to touch the load > balancer at all to get individual machines in and out of the load > balancer. Also, this type of scenario is far more automatable (rather than > telnetting into, say, a load balancer console interface and navigating > menus, ugh).
