How does saint mode work when director is being used?

[Kristian Lyngstol]

Greetings,

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 10:22:46AM -0800, Stroomer, Jeff wrote:
> To make this more concrete, let's say I am using a round-robin
> director to distribute traffic across three back ends named A, B, and
> C, and suppose that in vcl_fetch I see a 500 response that came from
> A.  If I set saint mode to 20 seconds on the response, does that mean
> that the object is blacklisted on A for 20 seconds, and therefore
> subsequent requests for that object  go to B and C?   And if  saint
> mode subsequently also blacklists the object on B and C as well, does
> that mean that grace mode kicks in, and a cached copy is returned?

Correct.

> Assuming I have this right, then it sounds like the backend health
> checks used by the director are a large-scale way to blacklist all
> requests for a back end, whereas saint mode is a small-scale
> object-by-object way to blacklist a back end.

That's precisely it. I couldn't have said it better myself.

- Kristian