Admin Services that do Load Balancing?

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Posted by Spiral Staircase, 10-23-2007, 03:22 PM
Hi there, I have a site that outgrown its server, and my current admin has suggest I get load balancing, but their unable to do it them selfs. Would anyone be able to suggest some decent and reputable solution/admins services that can do this for me? The site is php+mysql on centos and files are uploaded constantly by users on the site, also my admin said that the high loads was mostly due to http requests not mysql. Thanks! Spiral
Posted by Steven, 10-23-2007, 03:34 PM
I am assuming you want to have multiple webservers? They could just create a way to sync the content and use LVS from one of the boxes.
Posted by Scott.Mc, 10-23-2007, 05:58 PM
Well first of all if your "admin" cannot do load balancing then you do not have an admin and I would take anything they tell you with a grain of salt. Have a real admin look to see if you need load balancing or just a more powerful server before making such decisions.
Posted by mhalligan, 10-23-2007, 06:01 PM
Before you go buying hardware/software/services, figure out where your bottleneck actually is. I'm pretty sure your bottleneck is going to be in disk speed/throughput, as we've got a customer who runs a secure file sharing service. Log into your machine, and run vmstat 1. You'll get output like this: procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- -----cpu------ r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st 0 1 172 596816 23224 3006676 0 0 94 534 2 6 12 3 81 4 0 0 1 172 575332 23224 3028240 0 0 0 0 9059 3273 16 12 20 52 0 The important field here under the CPU section is wa If your wa field, which stands for I/O Wait.. This means your processes are waiting for the disk to move it's head to the appropriate sectors, and that the disk is trying to be in too many places at once. If the I/O Wait is regularly at 15, then you need more spindles. If it's really high, like 99, then you really need more spindles. Our customer who runs the file sharing service, their servers each have 4 disks in raid 10, and we can handle about 14 uploads simultaneously per server. When i/o wait starts averaging 15 for more than 5 hours per day, they provision another server. Provisioning a sever only makes sense in their system, because all of these uploads are being pre-processed (compressed, run through ImageMagick, etc) and once the upload completes, they're being copied over to a central file serve that has 24 disks. In your case, I'm guessing this isn't probably true. You should figure out how many concurrent uploads you're getting, and buy/lease a server that has one spindle for every 3 concurrent uploads.. So if you regularly see 15 concurrent uploads, you need about 5 spindles. One other question, are you performing any processing on files that are uploaded, like compressing them, running ImageMagick to create thumbnails, etc?
Posted by Spiral Staircase, 10-25-2007, 02:23 AM
Well my admin is Platinum Server Management, and there being praised left right and center in these forums. I asked them and they said they didn't do load balancing and referred me to someone who could, but I just came on here to find someone who more well known and reputable. And mhalligan, I don't think its the uploads that are causing the high load, as I doubt there would be any more than 3 concurrent uploads, let alone 15. They said it was my http requests as in lots of images, html pages being viewed. But thank you for your reply, and everyone elses.
Posted by Scott.Mc, 10-25-2007, 06:24 AM
My point above stands, I would suggest you get someone who handles large websites to look at the issue before going for a "load balanced" setup.
Posted by Hugin, 10-25-2007, 07:07 AM
I would start by tuning and optimizing the OS and applications before considering spending money on more hardware.
Posted by Steven, 10-25-2007, 12:28 PM
Agreed. Someone who relies on a control panel probably wouldn't be the best solution.
Posted by pmabraham, 10-25-2007, 01:18 PM
Greetings: H-Sphere supports load balancing; and we have clients under H-Sphere using load balancing. Depending on your needs, the automation / control panel solution (not all control panels offer high level automation as does H-Sphere) may not be needed. Thank you. Last edited by anon-e-mouse; 10-26-2007 at 03:30 AM.
Posted by chennaitechguy, 10-25-2007, 01:45 PM
will this work and is it easy to install and maintain hsphere ? will you install hsphere ?
Posted by Steven, 10-25-2007, 03:01 PM
Hsphere may support load balancing, but if your getting the traffic you are getting, you need a custom solution rather then throwing another control panel at it.
Posted by Hugin, 10-26-2007, 05:32 AM
Agreed. Cut the control panels already, sometimes one really needs to know what's on the lower layers and get dirty on the console.
Posted by jayglate, 10-27-2007, 03:00 AM
Without a control panel, you really do need to move to a fully managed hosting provider. One that also offers free email hosting with the service to make life easy and cheaper, so you don't mix email with your production secure infrastructure.

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