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There are many ways to do load balancing. Hardware, Software, DNS Round Robin and others.
Before you load balance a site, you must take into consideration many things....
1. If your site uses CGI, PHP, Shared Databases and such, you must be sure the data can be shared and that the programs accessing the data have been programmed to act in such a way. Any programs that access files, whether plain text file databases or SQL, the programs must KNOW when eachother are accessing the files so they dont step on one anothers toes.
using flock calls in perl and other languages is one way to do it.... BUT, that only works on LOCAL disks and MAY or MAY not work on shared disk space.... For example, if you have two servers load balanced and they both access data on a shared NFS mount or SAN, the locking of files may not be passed along to the other systems unless special steps are taken.
In the case of NFS, there is a built in locking daemon that mirrors locking information across the NFS system so that any and all other servers mounting the same NFS drive see the locks as well.
Load balancing is easy.... it's a simple science and programs do it point and click basically.... The hard part is where most web hosts and site owners fail.... Making sure their site is READY to be load balanced before doing so....
If you would like assistance in doing this please feel free to call on us whether you host with us or not. Obviously it would be cool should you decide to move to our network so we can micromanage this for you....
However we manage servers on many networks outside of our own..
:-)
Regards,
Chris Jester
619-227-8845
NJesterIII <-- AIM
64791506 <--- ICQ
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