Comments on: Mega Proxy Not So Mega, Akshually

By: The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem « Von'Victor Valentino Rosenchild – Blog

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:18:59 +0000

[...] on the same network. That’s not reality, it’s just the way it is. This is the inverse of the Mega-Proxy Problem suffered by load balancers in the early days of the scalable Internet. Combine narrow range of IP [...]

By: Paid Proxy

Paid Proxy — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:58:55 +0000

Crazy how many people still use and others profit with web proxies.

By: NickB

NickB — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:39:18 +0000

Correct, no economic sense if you look at traditional “legacy hardware appliances”.

However, wouldn’t it be great to combine this functionality with standard commodity server hardware?

Which you can do. Take a look at the Zeus eXtensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM), everything (and more) that you need in a load balancer. But the form factor is software, the perfect combination…

Nick

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:26:19 +0000

As a large manage hosting shop, we are frequently asked why one server gets hammered even though they’re using load balancing (with sticky). The culprit is almost always an office full of users behind NAT who use some web application hosted on the servers. Cookie-insertion is the next thing to do, but this gets more involved when SSL offloading is required to do the inserts for SSL traffic.

Ideally, we shouldn’t have to do this. The application should keep its own shared state and not care which web/application server the request lands on. I don’t know if this is short-sightedness of the application developer who never intended for their app to be load balanced, or if it’s an intentional push to move this to the load balancer.

If it’s the latter case, I don’t see how the it makes economic sense as the solution tries to scale up. As traffic increases, it requires bigger and faster load balancers to handle the extra persistence. These things are certainly not cheap when compared to server hardware+admin host.

By: stine

stine — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 05:05:17 +0000

mega-proxies are alive and well. If you have an AT&T wireless internet connection, by default your internet access is proxy’d (and your graphics are compressed as well).

By: Patrick Cannon

Patrick Cannon — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:05:05 +0000

The situation is still very much alive,mega proxies, in the hosted services industry serving the enterprise market. Some load balancers are better than others in handling it. Same goes for applications. Probably the best helper to getting around the problem has been virtualization. Being able to throw 20 servers at a farm in a short-period of time makes seasonal deployments of servers practical.

By: Etherealmind

Etherealmind — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:44:23 +0000

While it’s true that mega-proxies at carriers have died out (since the difficulty of running them was deemed to be more than the cost of raw bandwidth – a rousing management triumph of stupid over clever), we are seeing the rise of mega-proxies at large companies. These mega-proxies are used for scanning, security and logging of all Internet access (compliance etc). Having recently deployed a mega-proxy cluster for 60000 users with peak simultaneous access for 20000 users, I can say that its ‘not dead yet’.

On the other hand, the impact of these users on your loadbal rig is likely to be much less, 20000 corporate users are unlikely to flood most sites and cause unequal load balancing, unless, of course, you are providing services to large companies. In which, we know very well that this problem still exists.

Note also, that the rise of Blue Coat, Cisco WAAS and other web accelerators are an unknown quantity since they are also used to proxy HTTP.

Too much uncertainty for me to say with certainty, that L4 persistence is viable as a general observation.

(And the vendors are loving that because that sells more and bigger boxen)