

Don't use Pound for load balancing - emmett
http://blog.emmettshear.com/post/2008/03/03/Dont-use-Pound-for-load-balancing

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cstejerean
I'm not entirely certain I buy the argument that software which has lower CPU
and memory utilization on average is better (on the server).

The server is sitting there with all the ram and CPU and 2% or 20% doesn't
make a difference if there is nothing else to take advantage of that other 98
to 80%. The only thing that matters is the ability to handle peaks (and being
reliable).

You want server software that is optimized around the worst case scenario
(unless you want to run your software on servers with little resources in
which case it's the other way around).

So if nginx can handle higher loads than pound, it's a better load balancer.
But if it keeps my servers at 2% most of the time but does worse under high
loads then it's no good.

Now I wouldn't use Pound either for load balancing and I believe nginx should
be better, but the data in this article doesn't really support that argument.

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emmett
Of course the evidence is far from conclusive without more data. But Pound has
had terrible performance so far, and based on what data I have nginx is an
order of magnitude more efficient.

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michelson01
until fair proxy balancer is production ready
([http://www.brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-
bala...](http://www.brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-balancer-for-
nginx-and-mongrel)), i really like nginx in front of haproxy in front of the
mongrels

nginx => haproxy => mongrels

~~~
staunch
Doesn't hashing on a cookie from each server give you fairness?

[http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamRequestHashModu...](http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamRequestHashModule)

~~~
michelson01
i prefer a proxy balancer that is smart enough to know when the back-end
servers (mongrels in this case) are busy or not, and smart enough that it
doesn't send requests to back-end servers that are down (i'm looking at you,
apache mod_proxy_balancer)

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nickb
Emmett, what tool did you use to collect the data and make the graph?

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emmett
That's a graph straight from Ganglia (<http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/>),
which is what we use to monitor our servers.

~~~
nickb
Thank you!

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mwmanning
I've been really happy using apache2 in front of a mongrel cluster. Apache
serves up static files and load balances requests to the mongrels. Can anyone
give me a good reason why I should be using something other than apache on a
production server?

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vegai
Does anyone have experience in using Swiftiply in a production environment?

