Strange behaviour of mod_jk

[Cezar Grzelak <ce...@kinek.com>]

I have a two tomcat boxes running tomcat-3.2.3 which are load balanced using
mod_jk. Now everything worked fine until I started playing with the lbfactor
parameter in my workers.properties. Initially I had it configured so that
one box had an lbfactor of 3 while the other one had 2. When I tried to
switch the lb factor to be 1 on each box my cluster no longer worked! Only
one node on the system would receive all the trafic while the other would
sit completely idle. Certain combinations of lb factors seem to work just
fine (4 and 5 for example) while others seem not to work at all. I can't
even determine the pattern for which lb factors work. Has anyone come across
this issue before? It seem like a weird bug in mod_jk to me!
Please help as I'm running out of ideas on what to try next. Nothing seems
to cure the problem unless I set the lb factors to the values that mod_jk
"likes".

below is my workers.properties for reference:

#========workers.properties======================

workers.tomcat_home=c:\jakarta-tomcat-3.2.3

workers.java_home=c:\jdk1.3.1

ps=\



worker.list=loadbalancer

worker.ajp13chipman1.port=8009
worker.ajp13chipman1.host=chipman1
worker.ajp13chipman1.type=ajp13


worker.ajp13pebble.port=8009
worker.ajp13pebble.host=pebble
worker.ajp13pebble.type=ajp13


# this combindation of lbfactors seems to work fine!
worker.ajp13pebble.lbfactor=5
worker.ajp13chipman1.lbfactor=4

# the following makes load balancer NOT WORK!!!!
# only one of the nodes gets all the sessions
# worker.ajp13pebble.lbfactor=1
# worker.ajp13chipman1.lbfactor=1


worker.loadbalancer.type=lb
worker.loadbalancer.balanced_workers=ajp13chipman1, ajp13pebble

# ===================================

PS. My apache box is a win2k machine running apache 1.3.20(win32) and
mod_jk.dll which I found in tomcat's distribution binaries. chipman1 is a
win2k box running tomcat3.2.3 and pebble is a Sun solaris2.7 box running
tomcat3.2.3 also.

Any ideas what sort of problem I'm experiencing?

Thanks for any tips.

cezar