I've developed an embedded (Linux) load balancer solution. It's small form factor, runs on 8MB flash minimum, no hard drive, no fan so no wories about hard drive failure. It is LVS NAT (L4) based with configurable monitoring service. It load balances any port you want. I've deployed it to load balance web servers, mail server, etc. One of the busier sites is using it to load balance 6 web servers with 5M average hits a day. They've had twice that traffic and the load balancer seems to be fine. LVS says it can balance up to 24 servers. Cost $500.
John Siracusa wrote:
That's for all the info so far. To answer some questions, hardware is a cost issue right now. It's somewhat scary that $3,200 was a "reasonable" price several years ago, but I suppose it could be worse. We will investigate further. The mod_rewrite solutions lack dead server detection, and that's something I'd rather not try to roll on my own, especially after seeing how well (or not, actually) existing software solutions do. But I've added it to the list. We're investigating LVS right now. It's kind of disappointing to hear that the mod_perl solution it probably not feasible. Perl solutions are always more fun to implement ;) We chose pound over pen, but we may revisit pen again. I suspect we will have similar problems with our expected load, however. Whackamole, fun name aside, does not seem to be what we need. We don't need the caching part of Squid, and I wasn't aware it did load balancing too. I'll check it out. Thanks for all the info, and please feel free to send me more, especially if there's some gem of a software load balancer out there somewhere... :) -John
