Re: Load balancing and load determination

[Greg Ames <am...@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 8:53 AM Jim Jagielski <ji...@jagunet.com> wrote:

> As some of you know, one of my passions and area of focus is
> on the use of Apache httpd as a reverse proxy and, as such, load
> balancing, failover, etc are of vital interest to me.
>
> Thoughts? Ideas? Comments? Suggestions? :)
>

There are a couple of analogous systems from my former employer that used a
"pull from front end queue" concept for load balancing.  I thought that was
very interesting, although I never had any practical experience servicing
those systems.

The idea is that each back end pulls off work as quickly as possible.  If
one back end is slower/faster than the average, it just does less/more work
that the others, and no (bound to fail) clever oracle is required.  The
downside might be the presence of a front end queue which implies latency.
I don't know how such a system would perform when the back ends are only
lightly or moderately loaded and the front end queue is usually empty.

Greg Ames