Re: Sky is the limit with HAProxy?

Hi Marcus,

just my 2 cents regarding your hardware. I think that it will be more than perfectly ok.
At work we built a haproxy based failover-loadbalancing solution for a customer, using Linux running on an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU 2.4GHz, with 2GB of RAM. Currently this haproxy handles traffic between 500-600 MBit/s at peak times.
You might have seen Willy's report while testing 10G NICs (http://haproxy.1wt.eu/10g.html), which shows quite well, that the overall performance depends on quite some things, and hardware has to be wisely choosen and you should definetly do some tests to find a reasonable setup for your use case.
Definitely you have to get your hands a bit dirty while tweaking kernel settings via sysctl, and special care has to be taken if you have netfilter's conntrack stuff enabled, because you can easily run out of space of the conntrack table if you are using the default settings. (At least it happened to me, but sysctl is your friend ;)

I have to admit that I became I quite big fan of haproxy, and want to take the opportunity to thank Willy and all other people working on improving haproxy ;)

Cheers,
Christian

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:34:52 +0200 "Marcus Herou" <marcus.herou#tailsweep.com> wrote:

> Hi. Thanks that you took the time to answer.
>
> Dirty Harry is my second name :)
>
> Jokes aside, tweaking and tuning is what I like and
> performance is my high. I do not believe in silver
> bullets. I used to work for a huge company as a
> consultant and even though how much money they poured
> into the arch it never performed since they always needed
> everything to solve everything. For instance having
> Apache load all modules possible and turn on all options,
> having all java webapps in one BIG container etc. Stupid
> and waste of money and resources and in the end user
> experience.
>
> The requirements of our load balancing is quite simple
> since the nature of our architecure is as well. Basically
> all dynamic requests (which needs LB) should go to
> script.tailsweep.com and static ones to
> media.tailsweep.com and soon to come static.tailsweep.com.
>
> I will test haproxy on Ubuntu Hardy 64bit, 8GB, quad-core
> 2.4MHZ, RAID-1and apply a sysctl.conf which I normally
> use on our webservers. Is Linux bytw OK for the job ?
> Know some people do not like the schedulers in Linux.
> Want to have a look at the sysctl.conf ?
>
> I think I used 1.3.XX (perhaps .12 since it ships with
> Ubuntu these days). The webapp only had about 20 reqs/sec
> so it worked just perfectly. The main reason why I look
> at HAProxy is because my friends and some former
> colleagues recommends the product.
>
> Kindly
>
> //Marcus
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Jeffrey 'jf' Lim
> <jfs.world#gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Marcus Herou
> > <marcus.herou#tailsweep.com> wrote:
> > > Hi.
> > >
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > > The question is: Is HAProxy an alternative for us ?
> > >
> > > I'm thinking like this; Buy a couple of servers tuned
> > > for webserving and
> > try
> > > HAProxy on them and if that does not turn out well
> > > make them regular webservers and buy a hardware
> > > loadbalancer like the ones from loadbalancer.org
> > >
> > > I'm a geek at tuning systems on many levels and hate
> > > to waste money in unneeded infrastructure so I would
> > > really like to find that HAProxy meet
> > my
> > > criterias.
> > >
> > > I would as well rather have many smaller
> > > loadbalancers tweaked at serving different content
> > > than having a monster serving everything.
> > >
> > > Anyone have any input to guide me?
> > >
> >
> > haproxy can be fast - a lot of it will depend on both
> > how you tweak it.. and the platform on which you run
> > it. Do you have any special requirements for your
> > load-balancing? I find it helps for you to actually get
> > your hands dirty before you find out whether a piece of
> > software is suitable for you. I'd be curious about the
> > version of haproxy that you used in the past - which
> > version was it? and how was your experience with it?
> >
> > -jf
> >
>
>
>