Varnish and Perlbal

[André Cruz]

On 2007/07/02, at 15:00, Denis Brækhus wrote:
>
> André,
>
> If we can assume one of the reasons you want to use Perlbal is to  
> achieve some sort of failover capability, I would say place Perlbal  
> in front of Varnish. If you have another provision to handle that  
> and you only want to improve performance I would say it depends on  
> your application really. I completely agree with DES though that  
> implementing Varnish locally on the same box as apache is indeed  
> the path of least configuration and fewest changes :P
>

I'll start with that scenario then.

> From what I have read on Perlbal it should be suited for placement  
> in front of a cache such as varnish.
>
> Could I ask what your experience with Perlbal is? Is it a nice  
> loadbalancer? How does your setup with it look like?  What kind of  
> traffice do you see?
>

I use Perlbal for more than a year now and it has been a very good  
experience. Besides the great performance we have developed some  
custom plugins for it which I don't think would be possible with  
other solutions. We have numerous applications that use it... As an  
example, in one of them we have 2 perlbal servers in front of a pool  
of 4 apache servers and a traffic of about 40 Mbit/s. Without Perlbal  
all the apache workers would get used up quickly.

Hope it helps,
André Cruz