A certain book company might want to do a book on Perlbal and was asking
for a table of contents.

I wrote this up:

http://code.sixapart.com/svn/perlba...oc/book-toc.txt

Any other suggestions?

What do you guys want to see explained / documented / walked-through
better?

- Brad

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On 21 Sep 2006, at 20:37, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> A certain book company might want to do a book on Perlbal

O Really?

> and was asking
> for a table of contents.
>
> I wrote this up:
>
>     http://code.sixapart.com/svn/perlba...oc/book-toc.txt
>
> Any other suggestions?

Perlbal vs...
..LVS
..pound
..squid
..Apache/mod_proxy
..Hardware loadbalancers

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On 9/21/06, Brad Fitzpatrick <brad@danga.com> wrote:
> What do you guys want to see explained / documented / walked-through
> better?

When I tell people we use "perlbal" I get funny looks.  A book would
really help with legitimacy.

I'd like to see a section that shows how/where perlbal should plugin
to my infrastructure.  After I read it I'd like to know:

How to spec a Perlbal server
How many processes per server (SMP)
How many servers
Should I run perlbal on the same server as my squids or apaches?
Is perlbal right for me?  (wikipedia tried it, but it wasn't a good
fit for them).

Maybe it'd be best to explain all these things through case studies?

People keep asking me why there is no access/error log.  I point them
to the /var/log/messages, but that only answers so much.

Raw benchmarks would be nice, too.  They would go along great with
Mike's suggestion of comparing Perlbal to other servers.

btw, I sent you an email asking for the slides from the MogileFS
summit.  Can you send them to me?

Thanks,
Jay

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> On Behalf Of Brad Fitzpatrick
> Sent: Friday, 22 September 2006 7:38 a.m.

> A certain book company might want to do a book on Perlbal and
> was asking for a table of contents.

I'd buy that!

> I wrote this up:
>
>     http://code.sixapart.com/svn/perlba...oc/book-toc.txt
>
> Any other suggestions?
>

Lots of examples. The reason that I'd buy the book is that I find the
documentation a bit terse in parts, and the book would provide the
opportunity to expand on the topics a bit.

> What do you guys want to see explained / documented /
> walked-through better?
>

Case studies of typical real-world requirements, and how to meet them with
Perlbal. A detailed walk through of the plugins would be nice...

Dan

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On Sep 21, 2006, at 12:37, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:

> Any other suggestions?

How to use template toolkit to manage your configuration.  (the
perlbal configuration syntax is pretty tedious when you use it to
proxy port 80 to half a dozen different development sandboxes running
on high ports).


- ask

--
http://askask.com/  - http://develooper.com/

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Particular set of  Case studies of applications which have plugged in to
perlbal to achieve sets of features to scale their app,or enhance
perlbals base features  etc..
Example the way IMVU has achieved scalability by using their long polling
plugin into perlbal.IMVU has made their code publically available, and
putting that into the book with documentation as a case study could be
really cool..

-Prateek

On 9/22/06, Ask Bjørn Hansen <ask@develooper.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sep 21, 2006, at 12:37, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> 
>
> How to use template toolkit to manage your configuration.  (the
> perlbal configuration syntax is pretty tedious when you use it to
> proxy port 80 to half a dozen different development sandboxes running
> on high ports).
>
>
> - ask
>
> --
> http://askask.com/  - http://develooper.com/
>
>
>

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> A certain book company might want to do a book on Perlbal and was asking
> for a table of contents.
>
> I wrote this up:
>
>     http://code.sixapart.com/svn/perlba...oc/book-toc.txt
>
> Any other suggestions?
>
> What do you guys want to see explained / documented / walked-through
> better?
>
> - Brad
>
>

Perhaps a tip or two about managing multiple perlbal instances running
against the same pool of backend servers? I've hit gotchas with this
while abusing connect-ahead (we never had backend keepalives working
before, remember;) Minor, minor...

Hmm... One actual feature issue with perlbal that would make the book
harder to work through is the lack of a "show running-config" type
command. You can do a "show service blah", but that doesn't even display
the entire config for the service. It's easy to tune perlbal at runtime,
then completely forget what's been changed. (I see there's an open RT
bug for this already).

Explain enable-error-retries?

Some confusing points of perlbal config vs commercial LBs: (that at
least should be clarified/noted, if not actually fixed).

- You can create services and pools, enable/disable them, but not delete
them. Most commercial LBs allow anything to be added/deleted without
restarting.

- It doesn't seem to be possible to write a plugin to do mod_rewrite
style url rewriting? The only variable I could access for this was
marked read-only. Again, I could be stupid, but it also proves that it's
obnoxious to do. Market L7 LB's can do this.

- Load balancing your load balancer with linux LVS, iptables, OBSD PF,
whatever? The answer to "perlbal is out of CPU!?" is to add more
perlbals. This isn't usually done by LB users :P

- Maybe document some other features that are standard and often used
by, say, a Big/IP, and don't exist within perlbal?

- Your streaming plugins were a really fancy whizz-bang web 2.0 "thing"
that is very hard to do without something like perlbal. Explain/link at
least one of those?

Wish I had more office hour time to hack on PB 

-Dormando

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> A certain book company might want to do a book on Perlbal and was
asking
> for a table of contents.
>=20
> I wrote this up:
>=20
>     http://code.sixapart.com/svn/perlba...oc/book-toc.txt
>=20
> Any other suggestions?

A section or chapter on "Why Perlbal"--what specific problems it targets
and solves well.

A section on why async IO is good choice compared to say, threading,
forking models, etc.

A book on Perlbal would be great!

-- Dan

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On 9/21/06, Brad Fitzpatrick <brad@danga.com> wrote:
> Perlbal tricks  (teaser overviews to get excited, forward refs to more details in 
later sections)

Upload progress meter how to

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