When servers gotta work - thoughts about load balancing
I have written a short article about simple load balancing a few weeks ago and wanted to pick that topic up once more,
because people keep contacting me about that.
The kind of load-balancing you would need depends strongly on the features you offer for your downloaders. On tradebit we use, as described, the round robin feature of the DNS (which means, that each request to tradebit shoots you to another server in our cluster), but if you want to start with simply taking a bit load of a certain file (like Peter describes here), you might consider to use a “reverse proxy”. That, however, would mean, you would need an additional server in front of your serverfarm, which decides where to route the traffic to. IMHO is that a bit complicated in setup and there are solutions on a hardware out, which cost a bit more, but solve these problems much easier DIRECTLY on the line.
Before we started Tradebit I had a talk to the ev1servers.net sales department and they also offer “ready-made 2 nodes” versions of a Linux setup.
If you need bandwidth and reliability, do not hesitate to directly contact me, if I can not help you myself, I can point you to the right people, depending on your needs.
In the league of Terabytes you might also consider large ISPs like akamai or others, who focus on data delivery.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:01 am
[...] Ultimately, the best solution would be a traffic shaper, directly in the switch, which could do intelligent routing of traffic. That would also cover some Load Balancing issues. However are advanced switches a bit more expensive than a standard Linux PC, which could do the same job. [...]