Load balancer needed
 

I was wondering if anybody knows where I can get a good price on new or used load balancer?

load balancer you mean?

if you do mean load balancer.. it depends on your application, round robin dns may be enough.. if you mean load bouncer, what the hell is a load bouncer?

Yes, guys, my bad. I just updated the post.

What are you looking to load balance? That would help.

if you host with Jupiter (poppy) you get it free.

I'm going to have 3 servers that run my dating service sites. Mainly Perl scripts. DB is on the separate machine.

im not sure if theyre actually good or not, but i used to see these really cool F5 boxes at exodus. i think they also have ones to use demographic dns and stuff.. i would just search ebay.

Why you need 3 server with 42 hits per day average?
Stats

Maybe he plans on doing something new or spending some money on advertising? Why you need to be an asshat with only .046 posts/day average?



Eric... we could help you build a load balancing firewall.

ICQ: 158629363

Sorry, i prefer check my $ numbers than stupid post count.
You are not more smart with big post count to.

Wiz,

I get 4,000 uniques per day and every user stays on the site for average of 40 clicks. The application is all CGI, so the load is huge.

4000 uniques? You don't need a load balancer, you need a programmer or server admin who can fine tune your application.

Mr.Fiction,

The application has been designed and programmed by one of the best programmers in the industry with major experience.

Our customers spend so much time on the site and we have so many stats applications running behind the scenes that we do need a second and the third CGI servers to be able to run very fast and scale well.

i have no idea what the hell a load balancer is.

Juicy is the guy to talk to about load balancers. Loads are his life.

i

4000 uniques/day and its struggling? must be using mod_perl or something. if you can ditch mod_perl and make some more tuning (replace some code with periodically updated static text), you may be able to see an incredibly increase in performance.

with good code, you should be able to handle at least 1 million hits/day, not including images (ie just PHP or non-mod_perl CGI). images could be handled on the same server or a second server, several dozen million per day depending on size.

now if you want load balancing for the purposes of redundancy, that's another story. you should still get way more out of your current hardware though.

btw, you say it was done by one of the best programmers in the industry? only one comes to mind that would make that claim. are you, by chance, using drewstar?

There are so many factors that are involved in keeping a low server load for an application like this that making statements like "it should handle a bigger load" or "you should fix the code" are absoluelty unfounded. How do you know how fast my machine is or how much RAM I've got in it? How much stats and utils I'm running on the background?

In either way, as much as I appreciate everyone's opinion about my programmer's coding skills - I would really appreicate if we can get back to my initial topic of where I can get a load balancer.

I'm not a programmer, so I won't argue with him or you. :)

It does seem like you are going to need a lot of hardware if you need three machines for every 4000 uniques per day. Maybe there is a better way to set it up?

I'm not sure what your application does, but where are most of your resources being used - on the serving of pages or the database queries?

Are you using optimized webservers and then some other servers optimized for your database or do you have your database on one of the webservers?

Good post, very good post. For a more enterprise solution - hit up one of the large hosts on the board, we can all hook you up.

Mr.Fiction,

I have a separate DB server that runs on a very fast machine, so the queries are not the problem. The problem is a huge amount of CGIs that run every second in big amounts as my users tend to hang out on the site for a while once they login. I also have bunch of stats and utility scripts that are running on the background sucking up my server load.

Also, I'm not trying to "handle" the load that I have RIGHT NOW - I'm trying to be ready for the load that I'm going to have TOMORROW. You know what I mean?

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/images.../xyxthumbs.gif

I've harassed you enough for now. :)

Good luck with the site!

Always a pleasure, Mr.Fiction :-)

well, you have all of your hits, even things like terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc, going through "do.pl". it's no wonder there's so much load.

probably doesn't help that your "random image of the day" comes from a site without password protection/referrer protection/cross-server authentication:

http://digibucks.com/drive2/members/

i'm guessing do.pl is some template parser, but it must have a lot of code to handle all that stuff. sometimes monolithic programs are nice, but often they are the cause of major performance problems.

but go ahead, don't let me stop you from spending probably at least $10K-20K (you need at least two load balancer servers on the front end, so if one goes down you're still up, plus the handful of backend servers) ;)

It was just a question from my part, and GoBigTime the fucktard replyed like an ass.

Its only becauz your counter show 40 unique a day, thats why i asked about load balancing. ;)

Always a pleasure, Mr. Fiction