Load Balancing Digest

I posted this in reference to a question about load balancing database servers. It’s a PowerPoint given at a PHP conference in ‘05 given by John Allspaw of Flickr. It’s quite a good read, and talks about challenges that they faced when massively scaling an appliance load balancing solution for MySQL.

I’m a big fan of cookie persistence. It solves so many problems, and it makes persistence nearly 100% effective in just about any situation. It’s also a lot easier to flip a switch to enable cookie persistence than it is to bypass an application platform’s native session handling.  Why write your own stack [...]

I’m compiling a list of server load balancing vendors in the sub $5K category, where you can get at least one unit (and in some cases, redundant units) for less than $5,000 USD.
Three of the vendors had their features compared on the load-balancer.org site, and a thread on the load balancing mailing list as well [...]

A couple of (former) Nortel executives were charged by the SEC for cooking the books. Nortel of course is the company that purchased Alteon in 2000 $8 Billion. Alteons were great, although Nortel appears to have let the Alteon brand languish.

My cell phone provider text messaged me a notice about the Daylight Savings Time issue, and directed me to download a patch for my mobile phone.  I went to a website, downloaded the patch, and after my phone rebooted itself, it was fully patched for the new DST.
It’s really odd to say that my phone [...]

On March 1st, a user asked the asked a question about what they might do to fix the DST problem (Daylight Savings Time), since it’s changing this year, for older F5 BIG-IP systems that were out of contract and ineligible for code fixes.
Steve Lothspeich was kind enough to post a fix for the DST problem.

Looking for a product comparison of server load balancers? Then check out this site, which was brought to my attention last week. It’s a feature comparison of three of the popular load balancers in this low-cost SLB space: Coyote Point, KEMP, and Barracuda. I’m not sure who did this, but it [...]

A new breed of customers and vendors are permeating the server load balancing world, represented by users who are new to server load balancing, and vendors who are offering load balancers without some of the sophistication, but at a much lower price. And thus far, this market has largely gone unnoticed.
A Brief History of [...]

Note: This is an article I wrote for this site (in its previous incarnation) in January of 2003, hence the talk of the “current” dotcom bust.
The Internet, and especially auction sites like eBay, is seen as a great way to save money when buying networking and server equipment to fill out [...]