[BlueOnyx:13679] Re: Load balanced BO's

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

On 9/13/2013 8:44 AM, Richard Sidlin wrote:
> Hi
>
> We have just installed a dedicated BO server for a client. They seem to
> think that they will see demand in excess of one server. We installed it
> on a Quad Core XEON L5320 with 10GB RAM on 5108R.

Well, that greatly depends on the traffic, the construction of the site, 
and any underlying optimization that has gone on.  There are really a 
lot of variables to be considered - too many to give the yes/no answer 
you're probably looking for.

I have one customer system in front of me right now that is responsible 
for a single site that generates roughly 45Mbps of throughput during 
peak times, and around 15Mbps off-peak.  That server operates with less 
power and RAM than the system you mention, and it never has any issues. 
   Something we did was install lighttpd on the box and serve the static 
content with it (via proxy) and continue to have Apache handle the heavy 
lifting on dynamic content.   If that's "cheating," then so be it.  ;)

> Question is, how many roughly could access the one site that is on this
> server at the same time? If we need to go beyond that, is there an easy
> way to set up a cluster?

You can use Aventurin{e} to easily set up clustering, but it's failover 
clustering, not load balancing.

IMO, BlueOnyx is not what you want to be using if you're setting up 
multi-server clusters for performance.   BlueOnyx is ideally suited as a 
hosting appliance.  That is it's goal in life and is what it's DNA is 
specifically coded to do.    Your customer's thought process aside for a 
moment, before I started looking into clusters and so forth, I'd be 
looking into things such as performance-tuning MySQL for the specific 
site, the possibility of utilizing a lightweight http proxy, or even 
leveraging a CDN if need be.  Cobbling together a load-balancing 
BlueOnyx installation seems like more trouble than it's worth to me.

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ