On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 12:22:03PM -0400, Guy Hulbert wrote: > The simple solution is to buy a bigger piece of hardware or outsource > the problem to the relevent experts. > > Trying to do meaningful load-balancing within an application will not be > simple. At the router it is simple. All the required data is present > in one spot.
Load-balancing can be implemented at any arbitrary point in the stack (Ethernet/IP/DNS/TCP/HTTP/Application) and each has its own problems and features. There is nothing particularly appealing about doing it at the routing layer (though it does present a few novel options like using anycast or a TCP redirect), and doing it there has a few problems of its own. Either way, the more options and the more flexibility, the better. In the real world, you may find that many operations use multiple load-balancing techniques toghether (e.g. Google uses DNS, L2, L3 and L4 load-balancing). -- Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
