mod proxy balancer problem/question...

[Sean Alderman <salderman1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,
  I am running httpd 2.2.23.0-64 with mod_proxy to load balance Tomcat 6.0.36.B containers.  I have encountered a somewhat strange situation, and I was wondering if anyone could comment and or propose an alternative.

I have a case where my tomcat containers have multiple webservice applications deployed.  Most of the deployments are stateless, but a few of them require session stickiness at the proxy layer.  I am looking for ways to better distribute the workload of the stateless webservice calls, with the hope of not having to create a new tomcat container separate stateful and stateless sessions.  The following configuration was tested, but had unexpected results...

<Proxy balancer://webservices-sticky>
    BalancerMember ajp://tccontainer2.test.udayton.edu:12002 route=webservices2-sticky
    BalancerMember ajp://tccontainer1.test.udayton.edu:12002 route=webservices1-sticky status=+H
    ProxySet lbmethod=byrequests
    ProxySet stickysession=JSESSIONID
</Proxy>

<Proxy balancer://webservices>
    BalancerMember ajp://tccontainer1.test.udayton.edu:12002 loadfactor=1 route=webservices1
    BalancerMember ajp://tccontainer2.test.udayton.edu:12002 loadfactor=2 route=webservices2
    ProxySet lbmethod=byrequests
</Proxy>

What I find is that balancer://webservices never sends any requests to ajp://tccontainer1.test.udayton.edu:12002.  It would appear that the status=+H applies to the BalancerMember object instead of balancer://webservices-sticky.  When I remove the status=+H, it would appear that balancer://webservices load balances properly, but the consequence is the possibility of new stateful calls being routed to tccontainer1.

Is this behaviour expected?  Due to the long term nature of these sessions, I was hoping to avoid making both servers hold sessions and use the loadfactor to route a
 larger proportion of stateless calls to the server not service the 
stateful sessions.  Is there a means to accomplish the end goal with out creating additional tomcat containers? 

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Sean Alderman
Senior Engineer
University of Dayton, UDit Systems Integration