[Info-vax] How would you load balance excess webserver traffic between multiple OpenVMS servers?

Stephen Hoffman seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid
Mon Jan 11 10:58:47 EST 2021


On 2021-01-11 12:12:10 +0000, D W said:

> There are MULTIPLE different approaches to doing this. Most involve 
> HTTP (web) cookies and may involve DNS round robin load balancing or 
> load balancers.
> 
> But how would this be accomplished using Apache or another web package 
> on OpenVMS?

If locked into that configuration, with mod_proxy_balancer most likely. 
Same as with Apache elsewhere.

> Would you use the same approach?

mod_proxy_balancer or reverse-proxies or redirects or such? Prolly not. 
Depends. There's a whole lot of necessary detail here. Detail that's 
not yet been referenced.

> Also if you house a DB like RDB on a separate OpenVMS server, what 
> would be the fastest connect solution to obtain the fastest data 
> transport rates between the DB server and other web servers?

That depends. Sharing is a potential option, as can be replacing Rdb 
with something faster; an in-memory database, for instance. Or using a 
CDN, which can provide the bandwidth and DDoS protections and 
geographic distribution, among other benefits.

Other options include clustering and fibre channel and moving Rdb 
locally (which'll increase lock traffic), or moving to the fastest 
available network between the web servers and the database server.

This also involves performance and trend modeling, and likely involves 
replacing HDDs with SSDs and related efforts on the servers, as I'd 
expect a heavier load between Rdb and its database storage than between 
Rdb and the database client web servers.

If you're thinking about a Parler-class app for instance, there are 
already some discussions of what's involved there that are going on 
else-network and which you may want to review—even if you're not 
re-hosting Parler, the problems are broadly similar at scale.



-- 
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