Load Balancing Advice Needed
 

I have been with two hosts who attempted load balancing, and for some reason every time it is done my sales immediately drop off to nothing. Removing it returns sales to normal. But my site growing fast so I need this now. I can never seem to find out what causes this. Clearly something is fucking up my viewers experience.

Is there anything I should be extremely careful of or demand to have configured when I attempt this for the third time?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Hmm.. why in the world would your sales drop when you started doing load balancing? Was it DNS or hardware load balancing?

I am not totally sure. I know that they used one of the servers being load balanced as the director. Would that make it dns based? Would having a separate server just for this be better?

The best way to do it, is to actually get a hardware load balancer which is a peice of hardware which is completely independant of the servers, and balances the traffic between the content servers.

Its gonna be a couple k one time investment though, maybe the host can offer you a lease to own plan on it?

How much traffic do you need to load balance?

Did you ask phatservers about this?

Well I guess it's about maybe a million server file requests per day. This is just html and clipart. The video and photo content servers I plan to deal with differently and will get load balanced later on.

Sly from phatservers says their guy Mike is a server god, so that's comforting.

Haven't considered a hardware based option before. I've been with my old host for so long I never even knew there was lease to own options. Definitely something to discuss with them.

This is linux load balancing with lvs, there is no reason in the world you sales hould drop when you load balance like this. We have 2 linux load balnced cluster done like this and it works like a dream for us. If you need help or are interested in hosting with guys who really know this stuff hit me up

even with DNS load balancing (round robin) you shouldnt see drop offs.. sounds like one of the servers has a hardware problem possibly, or they have misconfigured the setup to point into a void occasionally?

Yah man, absolutely NO way your sales should drop with load balancing. That's insane.

We've setup LVS load balancing for several clients and had nothing but success.

I prefer building an LVS server over buying a prepackaged hardware solution. But, thats cuz we like the extra control and the lower price tag. Plus, if it does fail (and hardware based solutions always CAN), replacement is easy and usually on hand.

We have several clients setup with load balanced servers. This isn't going to be any problem at Phat Servers at all, I assure you. Why you were losing sales with your other hosts... I have no idea. But like I mentioned to you earlier today, Mike will have your servers running smooth as silk.

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

It could be the type of load balancing. If its bouncing from server to server on each request the sessions might not be saved unless you are nfs mounting the session dir. However if the sessions are sticky, where the user gets assigned to a server then it could just be your code. It really depends on how your signups are processed and such, if you are dropping sales its one of the two issues, just means you need to take time to go through the code to learn the nuts and bolts and get it to work with a load balanced setup.

I have learned that there are not many hosts out there that know how to do load balancing. I host at CyberWurx and they have become pretty good with load balancing on our setup. You definitely need a good host and a good programmer to work it all out and get it streamlined.

Hello ChrisJim,

Power Medium would certainly like the opportunity to assist you with a solution. Contact me directly and not only will I put you in touch with one our System Administrators but I can also give you some references of who we currently have load-balancing implemented for.

Thanks in advance,

Mark M.

In your case just use DNS round robin.. it should work fine for a while. This will give you enough time to review other load balancing options.