fair load balancing?

Drew Wilson amw at apple.com
Fri Jun 20 05:22:31 UTC 2008


On Jun 19, 2008, at 7:08 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
>> I'll admit I'm completely knew to Perlbal, but I don't understand how
>> verify_backend will work here.
>>
>> I just ran Perlbal up last week, proxying http requests to Mongrel  
>> app
>> servers.
>> I had "SET verify_backend  = on" in my config file.
>>
>> I still saw long-requests blocking subsequent requests.
>>
>> Am I misunderstanding something?
>
> verify_backend makes the process of connecting to a backend into this:
>
> 1) start TCP connection to backend
> 2) on accept, send an "OPTIONS *" request
> 3) on 200 OK response, put backend in the pool
>
> The critical step is #2, and that's what makes this work.  Let's say
> you have Apache setup to MaxClients of 20, this will happen:
>
> * the first 20 requests come in, are assigned backends, and Perlbal
> uses them because they responded to OPTIONS *
> * the 21st connection Perlbal makes sits idle - beccause there is no
> Apache process to serve it
> * when one of the first 20 dies off, Apache will respond to the 21st,
> and Perlbal spawns a new 21st
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Makes sense for Apache and other  
app servers that let child processes handle the requests.

> What ends up happening here is that Perlbal will use up exactly as
> many MaxClients as you specify - and no more.  Since (I assume) you
> have persistent connections to the backend, it works out perfectly.
> You can adjust the load on a server by adjusting MaxClients.  Of
> course, this does assume that on average, your requests are roughly
> equal in how much processing power it takes.
>
> I assume that Mongrel will let you do the same thing - specify how
> many processes to serve requests with.  If they use the same behavior,
> then this approach will work out just as well for you as it does for
> Apache based systems.
Unfortunately, Mongrel doesn't spawn multiple processes to handle  
requests: it queues up each request and dispatches each request to  
Rails one at a time (since Rails is not threaded.) Mongrel doesn't  
support the OPTIONS method.

So instead of one Mongrel server managing several processes, we start  
up N mongrel app instances on each app server, and expect the balancer  
to handle the efficient routing. Sounds like is a bad expectation.

Now that you've explained this, it makes sense that there aren't that  
many balancers trying to balance each request: they expect the back- 
end to handle concurrent load.

I think our problem is with Mongrel. I will investigate using  
mod_rails, which will scale the way you describe.

Thanks again,

Drew



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