[buug] hardware load balancing vs software

[John de la Garza]

I'm not asking if we should use tomcat or apache

Im asking if we should use a hardware loadbalancer or apache to load 
balance

apache will be used regardless


On Aug 27, 2004, at 10:21 PM, Stefan Lasiewski wrote:

> --- johnd <john at jjdev.com> wrote:
>
>> at my company we have a 'web-switch'
>>
>> for one example...traffic comes in and it balances bewteen two
>> apache servers
>>
>> each apache load balances across 4 tomcat servers...
>>
>> Wouldn't it be better to just have the webswitch do all the load 
>> balancing?
>
> What is the goal? Simplicity or speed? Removing the Apaches will 
> certainly
> simplify the network, but then you will lose the power of Apache and 
> might
> dump more processing on Tomcat, which might slow everything down.
>
> Also, the webswitch will do the load balancing regardless if it's 
> talking to
> Apache or Tomcat, right?
>
> In most networks, Apache really doesn't add much to the latency. The
> load-balancing algorithm is pretty simple-- I think the module polls 
> the
> Tomcats once per minute or if there is a timeout.
>
>> either by going straight to the tomcats (we proxy %100 of the traffic)
>
> Plenty of people run their sites directly off tomcat, but I'm not sure 
> if the
> HTTP engine within Tomcat is intended to be an efficient HTTP server. 
> Also,
> are you sure you want Tomcat to handle the images and flat html files? 
> It's
> often more efficient to let Apache handle the static content and let 
> Tomcat
> deal with the dynamic JSPs.
>
>> or if we need apache, to have 8 instances of apache..or a multiple of 
>> that
>> running virtual hosts?
>>
>> maybe two apache servers for redundancy each one running 4 virt hosts
>>
>> basically what I'm curious about is if we have a hardware loadbalancer
>> do we need to do more software loadbalancing?
>
> If you have two or more Tomcats you would still need a way to evenly
> distribute the requests, so software loadbalancing would still be 
> necessary
> between the Apache & Tomcat.
>
>
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