Got a popular site? load balancing

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Payton

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Jun 24, 2006
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What do you do for load balancing? Do you seperate the db onto its own server?
 


That is a popular solution. You can also use a round-robin DNS solution to spread the traffic amongst several servers.
 
I'm interested in this as well. It would be nice to hear more details about some of your experiences and solutions.
 
MisterX said:
I'm interested in this as well. It would be nice to hear more details about some of your experiences and solutions.
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Well the first thing you have to do is determine the bottleneck. This could be the database using 90% of the CPU cycles, it could be bandwidth, it could be general CPU overload from requests.

Then, based on the bottleneck, you balance things out by distributing the load over several servers, putting the DB on its own server, etc.

Every scenario is unique depending on CMS, DB choice, DB size, available bandwidth, etc.
 
theNOTO said:
Well the first thing you have to do is determine the bottleneck. This could be the database using 90% of the CPU cycles, it could be bandwidth, it could be general CPU overload from requests.

Then, based on the bottleneck, you balance things out by distributing the load over several servers, putting the DB on its own server, etc.

Every scenario is unique depending on CMS, DB choice, DB size, available bandwidth, etc.
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Thanks, that's exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Do you know of any good tutorials which explain how to determine the bottleneck, which tools to use etc. ?!
 
peach said:
How do you go about looking for bottlenecks?
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On Windows, you can use the Process Manager to watch CPU and Memory usage.

On Linux, you can use 'top' to look at processes, CPU usage and memory.

Bandwidth can be harder to track. If you have access to the router in front of your server, you can monitor it from there. On shared accounts, you can look at the utilities they provide in the control panel to see how you are doing.
 
unfortunately this might be tough to find on shared hosting, you would probably have to contact your hosting company when you have slowdowns

if you have root access you can run top and see what's running
 
Payton said:
unfortunately this might be tough to find on shared hosting, you would probably have to contact your hosting company when you have slowdowns

if you have root access you can run top and see what's running
Click to expand...

Under Cpanel, you can click "Server status" which will show you the CPU load, memory usage, etc., but not individual process activity.

I don't think anyone using shared hosted should probably be too worried about load balancing anyway.
 
The Interworx control panel is an excellent solution for load balancing. It's what I use for my high-traffic sites and the results have been great. We just run all of our sites on the cluster and add new servers as needed.

Basically, with Interworx you set up a cluster of servers - one dedicated database server, and 1 or more front-end web servers. You don't need any special load balancing hardware. Extra web servers can be added to the cluster as needed. Everything is controlled through the Interworx control panel as if you're working with one single server. You can easily add sites, upload files, administer databases, etc.

More info is at http://interworx.com/ , along with a list of server providers who sell the Interworx CP.
 
I really liked Interworx, just a few things kept me away from using it full time.. probably take another look in a year when those things are hopefully fixed
 
Out of curiousity, what problems did you have with it? I haven't run into any issues, but maybe you can save me from some unexpected frustration in the future.
 
No built-in mailing list support but you can hack mailman to get it working
Email forwarders don't import from cPanel, 2 step process req to setup a forwarder to a group of people
Can't subdomain redirect - you can try htaccess workaround, didn't quite get it working
Can't domain redirect to url

If I were starting a new account I think I could live with these problems, however, having to move cPanel accounts over was not doable.

For anyone considering Interworx I would highly recommend it if they can live with those few bugs. Their support team is excellent and was willing to help me at all hours of the day.
 
I see. I guess these are all things I haven't had a need for yet. Thanks for the info!

I'll second what you said about the support. Those guys will always go above and beyond. They give the best support I've ever had from any company online or offline. Period.
 
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