

Ask HN: What hardware do you use to run your load balancer ? - whyleyc

This is a follow-on to my post last month about what load-balancing software people use (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180311)<p>I'm now considering what hardware to push this software onto :-)<p>- What hardware are you using to run Nginx / HAProxy / Pound on ?<p>- Are there any tips around how much memory / processor / disk you've gone for that you'd be happy to share ?
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anotherjesse
Nginx/HAProxy/Pound probably don't care about disk access if they are
balancing.

<http://haproxy.1wt.eu/news.html> shows that he got nearly 10Gbps on "cheap"
hardware (excluding the donated NICs)

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anotherjesse
I run Nginx/HAProxy/PostgresQL/Memcache/Mongrels/Solr all on a single box $200
box from serverbeach (2 cores, 3GB ram)

The site averaged 581,661 dynamic requests per day over the last 21 days, and
my biggest problem with the server performance has been the rails production
log analyzer. The parser hits something and spins.

(I rotate my logs hourly, and this hasn't been a huge issue so I've dealt with
it by watching for log analyzing processes that take too long and kill them)

Sorry it isn't that exciting hardware wise. If traffic continues to go up,
I'll be needed to expand to multiple boxes, of which softlayer a nice variety
and I look forward to reading more about what I should be using here.

Probably stupid stats with the single box setup: every request hits nginx, and
it uses on average 3 minutes of time per day (as report reported by ps),
haproxy is forwarded every dynamic request and has 4 minutes of cpu time. I've
not had to do much instrumentation of hparoxy/nginx since they are the
lightest weight piece of my stack.

