on 3/13/09 7:17 PM, Christopher Webber said:

> Oops... I am just compiling a list still and heard that nginx did TCP 
> level load balancing. I will take that off my list.

If you want to talk about load balancing, you first need to make sure 
you understand the basics, and the article at 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)> isn't bad.  It 
even includes a link to Tony Bourke's O'Reilly book on the subject, 
which is a must read for anyone getting into this subject.  It's not 
that great, but as an intro, I don't know of anything that's better.

However, the mailing list that Tony runs is much better than the book. 
You can get lots of good info there.


Then you have to start looking at the application.  General load 
balancing techniques may very well not apply well to all protocols or 
systems.  For example, putting NTP time servers behind load balancers 
are a really bad idea.  See the brief mention in section X.Y.Z of the 
NTP Public Service Project Community Supported Documentation at 
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/ar68dz>, and the expanded article "Building 
Scalable NTP Server Infrastructures" that I wrote for _;login:_ magazine 
at <http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2008-10/index.html>.  If 
you don't have a USENIX account, let me know and I'll see if I can dig 
up a copy of the PDF version they sent me as the final draft.

With regards to specific protocols and applications, you'd need to go to 
the documentation, FAQs, mailing lists, etc... that are appropriate to 
your software and find out what the experts suggest.  If you're using 
OpenLDAP, then they have a variety of information sources for you linked 
from their main page at <http://www.openldap.org/>.


Some quick Googling has turned up BalanceNG (see 
<http://www.inlab.de/balanceng/>) and Pure Load Balancer (see 
<http://plb.sunsite.dk/performance.html>) as two potential options that 
might work for you, but you really should check with the experts who 
know your software best.

-- 
Brad Knowles
<[email protected]>        If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out
LinkedIn Profile:                 my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at
<http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>    http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks
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