Perlbal - When to use Perlbal

Author

When to use Perlbal

J Davis

2007-10-30, 7:11 pm

Hello,

I've been running a series of comparisons between a number of load balancing
options for a client and it has raised a few basic questions in my mind.
Though our test methodology has been less then strict, my experience has
been that Perlbal tends to handle more connections per second (as a reverse
proxy for two backend IIS servers) then LVS and most of the hardware load
balancers we've tested. This is great, but I remember seeing in a couple of
places were people using Perlbal or similar products as reverse proxies will
place them behind a hardware balancer or LVS box. So I guess I have two
questions.
1. Is my experience normal? Does Perlbal usually outperform commercial
hardware load balancers?
2. If Perlbal is faster then a hardware device wouldn't it restrict
performance to place it behind one?

I realize that the hardware devices have HA features that Perlbal lacks but
wouldn't it make sense to add a heartbeat fail over mechanism to your pool
of Perlbals instead of placing them behind another load balancer?

Thanks!
-Jake

Ask Bjørn Hansen

2007-10-30, 7:11 pm

On Oct 30, 2007, at 11:19, J Davis wrote:

> I realize that the hardware devices have HA features that Perlbal
> lacks but wouldn't it make sense to add a heartbeat fail over
> mechanism to your pool of Perlbals instead of placing them behind
> another load balancer?

Perlbal does better load balancing than the hardware devices, so it's
better for the load balancing of the backend servers.

For load balancing and making perlbal itself highly available, a
"hardware loadbalancer" is fine if you have one anyway.

I usually use wackamole to make the public HTTP IPs highly available -
it works very very well.

- ask

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