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CarpeNoctem
Asked: 2011-09-29 16:50:02 +0800 CST

Load balancer for URL-hash based balancing?

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What is an open source load balancer that allows for hash based balancing? I would like to do hash based load balancing of a URL but first remove the user specific arguments from the URL. Basically want to increase Varnish's cache performance by adding URL to node persistence.

Example: example.com/foo/usertoken/bar

Where the hash would be based on: example.com/foo/bar.

  • Edited for clarity, bias, and URL modification. *
load-balancing

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    "Best" is in the eye of the beholder, so this answer is only an approximation.

    HAProxy is great if:

    • You need the highest possible per-machine load balancer performance.
    • You don't need SSL termination on the load balancer.
    • You value reliability and version stability highly.

    nginx is great if:

    • You want more pre- and post-processing of the HTTP stream on the load balancer, such as GZip compression or SSL termination.
    • You value connection buffering, where the load balancer will buffer content between the clients and the backend servers (useful for some 'scripting language' backends which have a high connection overhead).
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  2. HAProxy and nginx are both able to load balance according to a hash of the requested URL.

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  3. Varnish is a capable load balancer. It does HTTP/1.1 against the client and the backend, has health probles, can do target URL hashing. You just turn off the caching if you plan on doing caching in a separate tier.

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