Comments on: Problems in Loadblancing http://www.royans.net/rant/2000/12/03/problems-in-loadblancing/ @royans.net Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:46:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: loadbalancer http://www.royans.net/rant/2000/12/03/problems-in-loadblancing/#comment-1006 loadbalancer Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:21:34 +0000 http://www.royans.net/logs/2000/12/03/problems-in-loadblancing/#comment-1006 It always amazes me how poorly designed certain so called 'enterprise applications' actually are. Every blue print for enterprise applications I have ever seen has definitively stated that the application layer must preserve it's own state. You won't catch Google/Msn/Slashdot or any other high performance web site using something as privative as a load balancer for preserving state. Persistence will be built into the application from the ground up taking into account all the performance issues surrounding that and dealing with them. It is a trivial task to implement persistence for web applications on any platform apache or IIS (using a combination of URL/Cookie/Database). When you need to scale you just stick a fast pair of layer 4 load balancers on the front of the farm and grow. It really shouldn't matter what IP address people are coming from and on a properly designed site it never will. It always amazes me how poorly designed certain so called ‘enterprise applications’ actually are. Every blue print for enterprise applications I have ever seen has definitively stated that the application layer must preserve it’s own state.

You won’t catch Google/Msn/Slashdot or any other high performance web site using something as privative as a load balancer for preserving state. Persistence will be built into the application from the ground up taking into account all the performance issues surrounding that and dealing with them.

It is a trivial task to implement persistence for web applications on any platform apache or IIS (using a combination of URL/Cookie/Database).

When you need to scale you just stick a fast pair of layer 4 load balancers on the front of the farm and grow. It really shouldn’t matter what IP address people are coming from and on a properly designed site it never will.

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