We actually have at least one customer that uses XMPP and presence for load balanced and redundant services, but they built their applications from the ground up with this in mind.
However, as Hal said, use a load balancer made for HTTP. :) NLB in Windows does a great job. I'm sure there are equally free technologies for the *nix world as well. -JD Conley > Right. And if that is too expensive, you can use software load > balancing (such as Windows NLB /WLBS). I think using XMPP for this > would be unwise. > > On 2/13/06, Paul Clegg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >From your description, it seems that a hardware load balancer in front > of > > your web service farm would do this job easily and transparently. > > > > -Paul > > > > > > On 2/13/06, Matthew Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > We have a bunch of boxes (20 or so) that offer web-services to our > > > server farm of several hundred boxes. Right now, if a box on a farm > > > needs to connect to one of the web service boxes, it iterates through > > > a list of all the web-service boxes, and tries to connect to each one, > > > until it finds one that is free to handle the request. > > > > > > I'm thinking that a better model might be to create a MUC where each > > > of the web-service boxes are persistently connected. They would use > > > their presence attribute to indicate whether they are available or > > > busy. > > > > > > When one of the farm boxes needs to make a request, it would connect > > > to the chat, get the presence info for all the web-service boxes, and > > > then choose one of the available servers to send a request to. > > > > > > In order to send the request, I figured the client could send a > > > message to the room and specify in the message which server process it > > > is sending the request to. > > > > > > At this point, the server would > > > * update its presence to busy; > > > * handle the request; > > > * put a message back into the chat room, with the request results; > > > * update its presence to available > > > > > > I'd prefer that the clients and servers communicate through the room, > > > rather than directly, so that I can just log the chat room and see all > > > the transactions. > > > > > > A few questions: > > > * Is this asinine? > > > * Has anyone done anything like this? Are there any hidden gotchas > > > you discovered? > > > * Is there any reason to mix in some jabber-RPC? > > > > > > All advice is appreciated. > > > > > > > > > > -- > Psi webmaster (http://psi-im.org) > im:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://halr9000.com
