I've had really good experiences with load balancing a large php app using windows 2003 NLB (network load balancing) (really, windows, I'm not kidding :)). It's available in 2003 server, you just have to turn it on and configure. If you're using windows currently I'd give it a shot before purchasing a dedicated load balancer. There are some nice ones out there, but the major drawback is redundancy. If your load balancer goes out, all of your nodes are unavailable, So, you'd need at least 2 hardware load balancers operating in failover mode. If you care nothing about availability and only care about the performance then you've got alot of options. Of course to load balance your app you need to centralize your data onto a dedicated data server. You'll have to put some thought into your session issue, and any other data read/written by the app. good luck, will > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: load balancer question > From: jonathan <news_php@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Tue, December 20, 2005 8:54 pm > To: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > > I was having a discussion about scaling a php-based app. Most of the > sites I've worked on have easily fit into a single server model. I"m > looking at a site that will need to scale beyond that. The > anticipated bottleneck will be TCP connections and database > performance. I'm looking at load balancers and was wondering if > people had experience with one that they felt was up to task. > > We do use sessions and I would not like to go to a saving session > data on another box or in the database. I would prefer for the > session identifier cookie to determine which box the user goes to. > > thanks, > > jonathan > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
