On May 6, 2009, at 1:00 PM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
Jim Jagielski wrote:
That's why oob-like health-and-status chatter is nice, because
it doesn't interfere with the normal reverse-proxy/host logic.
+1, for a backend of unknown status (let's just say it's a few minutes
old, effectively useless information now) ping/pong is the right first
approach. But...
An idea: Instead of asking for this info before sending the
request, what about the backend sending it as part of the response,
as a response header. You don't know that status of the machine
"now", but you do know the status of it right after it handled the
last
request (the last time you saw it) and, assuming nothing else touched
it, that status is likely still "good".
Yup; that seems like the only sane approach, add an X-Backend-Status
or
whatnot to report the load or other health data.
For example, how long it took me (the backend server) to handle
this request... would be useful to know *that* in additional to
the typical "round-trip" time :)
