Keeping intouch with F5′s Dev Central another great article submitted by Lori Mac Vittie.
[singlepic id=24 w=320 h=240 mode=web20 float=left] Lori ventures into the realm of “Load Balancing” a single server, and explains how it can be accomplished.
Now, not many of you reading this article will have a single server, and would be more concerned about managing many, many of them. But what is interesting about the article is that demonstrating F5′s capaibilies while adressing one single server, the impact and capabilities is exponential when supporting/”balancing”/accelerating a whole farm/data cetnre of them.
[singlepic id=25 w=320 h=240 float=right] Lori higlights 3 key facts that provide performance metrics to this scenario. – I am quoting Lori here directly on the next three points, and you can see the full article from her post (click here for the full article)
- A modern load balancer, a.k.a. application delivery controller, can optimize TCP connections via TCP multiplexing. This will improve resource (RAM, CPU) utilization and increase the total number of concurrent users you can serve on a single server. In the face of a request onslaught, this one feature may be the difference between users seeing “Connection Timed Out” and your content.
- Offloading CPU intense operations like compression and SSL operations also improves capacity by letting your application spend time on application logic rather than ancillary encryption functions. Depending on the size and type of content and length of keys, this can net you a nice boost in not only capacity but also performance.
- Applying security at the edge of the network before it gets to the server can alleviate a lot of painful processing that essentially results in nothing more than a rejection (or worse, a compromised site). Protocol layer security detects and mitigates DoS attacks, manipulation of protocols as an attempted exploit of the network, and other protocol related attacks. Rather than wasting server resources on these useless packets, a load balancer/application delivery controller can do it at the point of entry, thus improving the capacity of the server to handle legitimate requests.
Before today, if you had of told me it was possible to load balance a single server, I would have looked at you funny… but if you said that you could ensure better performance of that server with applcation delviery and accelderation I would have wanted to know more. A great article!
Thanks Lori!
WILS: How can a load balancer keep a single server site available?.
About Adam DaCosta
I thoroughly enjoy technology and in particular communication technology. Unification of voice, video and data, and how technology can enable and provide users and organizations the ability to communicate more effectively. Connect with me through this blog, Twitter(@adamdacosta) or Check out my about.me profile!, I look forward to hearing from you!
