[Eventmachine-talk] EM based clustering proxy for web apps

Kirk Haines
Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:27:58 -0000

Just figured I''d send out a preliminary note letting you all know that
I am working on a clustering proxy for web apps that uses EM.

It was born out of a need for a simple clustering deployment solution
for IOWA that carries with it a little bit more intelligence than the
typical load balancing proxy does.

I am building it with features that I want for it to work with IOWA,
but intend it to be usable with other web frameworks, as well.

I should be doing an initial release within about a week, but my
initial testing is pretty satisfying.

The current state of it will, on my test platform (an older dual
processor box running 2ghz AMD athlon 32-bit cpus and a linux 2.4
kernel), running to a pair of IOWA backends, deliver static files at
the same speed that Apache does on this system (2800/second).  And
testing using a copy of a real, production site show it to be very
effective so far.

A site that dynamically renders about 200 pages per second through a
single IOWA process will render 360/second or so through the
clustering proxy to two backends, and a site that will do 90/second,
with a database hit happening on every request (db server on the same
box), will reliably do 160/second with two backends there, as well.


Kirk Haines