Velocity 09: Alan Kasindorf, "Load Balancing Roundup"

• Stupid L4 (round robin)
• Slightly smarter L4 (least connection, weighted RR, etc)
• L7, or inspection based load balancing.
• Perlbal. Guess that’s also L7

In this session we’ll briefly go over each of the basic load balancing algorithms as they’re implemented in popular open source load balancers.

In a second half we’ll show some synthetic load testing situations to illustrate how traffic handles under the different algorithms.

Noticed your servers overloading all the time? Perhaps they’re idle 50% of the time? Want to minimize latency? You might want a thorough understanding of load balancing.

Kasindorf is the MySQL DBA for Six Apart’s properties, as well as many of their scaling tools. A sysadmin for livejournal.com in 2002, he has since helped build numerous large web sites with open source software and is an advocate and contributor for Memcached, mogilefs, perlbal, and others.