Posts

Showing posts from January 23, 2010

HAProxy : Load balancing

Image
Designing any scalable web architecture would be incomplete without investigating “load balancers”.  There used to be a time when selecting and installing load balancers was an art by itself. Not anymore. A lot of organizations today, use Apache web servers as a proxy server (and also as a load balancer) for the backend application clusters. Though Apache is the most popular web server in the world, it also considered over-weight if all you want to do is proxy a web application. The huge codebase which apache comes with and the separate modules which need to be compiled and configured with it, could soon become a liability. HAProxy is a tiny proxying engine which doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of apache, but is highly qualified to act as a HTTP/TCP proxy server. Here are some of the other wonderful things I liked about it Extremely tiny codebase. Just two runtime files to worry about, the binary and the configuration file. Compiles in seconds. 10 seconds the