

Using iptables to balance Node.js - sparrish
http://blog.nodeping.com/2011/08/15/using-iptables-to-balance-node-js-processes/

======
adamtulinius
Or he could do it with a proper load balancing proxy such as HA Proxy. Then he
would be able to take one node-instance down gracefully, update it to a newer
version, and put it online again (and repeat for all other instances). Another
benefit would be more fair share of the load (not every request will take the
same amount of time to complete).

~~~
mtogo
But this is both awkward _and_ hard to manage! You just don't get that with
HAProxy.

~~~
dcaylor
I'd agree that a balancing proxy is more appropriate for HA. The post mentions
that this is specifically not intended as a high availability solution. It's a
fairly narrow use.

------
chopsueyar
Is it fairly common to forward port 80 to some higher level port, so the
server can run as a non-root user?

I do it out of necessity, but have yet to play with the statistics portion of
iptables.

Cool little article.

~~~
jvoorhis
I've used this trick to forward to a Twisted Conch daemon running as a non-
root user. However, I would never consider this approach for load balancing.

~~~
sparrish
Why would you never consider it for load balancing?

~~~
adamtulinius
Because first of all it's just a variation of round-robin, which doesn't take
into account that different requests will take varying amounts of time.

Secondly, you can't (in an easy way) remove or add to the pool of backends.

I'm confident others will come up with more not-so-compelling reasons for
using iptables for load balancing.

