 |  |
At 10:06 AM -0400 10/18/01, Joseph D'Andrea wrote:
Re: "dynamic" load balancing...
From: Men & Mice Support
Date: Thursday, October 18, 2001
Time: 10:26:23 am
>We're just now ramping up for first client that needs load
>balancing. (site mentioned on CNN frequently.)
>
> We have QuickDNS 3. Web and DNS servers are MacOS 9.1. I'm just
>doing some preliminary reading now and I noticed in the 2.x to 3.x
>document that "dynaminc load balancing" is no longer supported."
>
>I guess my main question at this time is "what is dynamic load
>balancing" and what am I missing if it's not supported?
Dynamic load balancing, as opposed to fixed-preference load
balancing, was where the web server was supposed to give QuickDNS
some indication of how much traffic it could handle at the moment.
QuickDNS would then try apportion traffic so that faster servers
would get more traffic than slower servers, and if a server was
suddenly inundated, traffic would be rerouted to other servers.
Unfortunately, it didn't work so well. Unless a server was being
really hammered, it always reported that it was idle. A better result
could be obtained by having the administrator set fixed preferences.
Furthermore, in order to support other web servers besides WebSTAR,
we had to remove the component that was WebSTAR-specific (the
plug-in). This meant that a system where the web server was in
communication with QuickDNS wasn't going to work for version 3. So we
eliminated dynamic load preferences.
>I want to be able to spread out the load from one machine to another
>in a more or less even pattern. 50% to one and 50% to the other. I'm
>assuming that I'll have this basic capability.
Yes.
>I also want to be sure that if one machine stops responding that the
>other machine gets all the requests. Is this still a feature of v3?
Yes.
>Any gothchas that I should know about before launching this project?
Only that such load balancing is only available with QuickDNS for
Classic Mac OS. If in the future you should decide to change DNS
server platforms, you'll need to find an alternative load balancing
and fault tolerance mechanism.
____________________________________________________________________
Chris Buxton Men & Mice
support@menandmice.com Making DNS Easy
Messages In This Thread:
Return to Digital Point Solutions' Home Page