Latest
Architecting resilient object storage: Delivering multi-site capabilities for HPE with Loadbalancer.org GSLB
By combining the two technologies, this unified solution addresses a critical gap.
Insights from the load balancer experts
Application Management
Layer 7 load balancing: The complete guide to boosting application performance
Layer 7 is content-aware so able to make intelligent decisions about where to send traffic...
Storage
Optimizing data storage: Using content-length headers to solve the 'small objects problem'
Small workloads can sometimes create a unique set of problems that are hard to solve...
GSLB
The ultimate guide to Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB): Benefits, uses, and configurations
Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) enables you to distribute internet or corporate network traffic across servers in multiple locations, anywhere in the world...
HAProxy
Load Balancer performance: Benchmarking HAProxy on EC2 (Quick and Dirty Style)
I get quite frustrated with benchmarks because they are very hard to perform properly, and even when you do them properly its very hard to get any useful data from them...
Application Management
Apache and X-Forwarded-For Header: How to log XFF using Apache
There’s been a lot of debate here in the office about how best to capture both your Loadbalancer’s IP and the Source IP of the user in your access_log in Apache 2.4. This is the tried and tested method we've come up with...
How-tos
IIS and X-Forwarded-For Header (XFF)
Although it's not technically a standard, the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header is incredibly useful if you have any kind of proxy in front of your web servers...
GSLB
Why does GSLB suck?
Ok, before I start to fan the flames, let me start with the usual caveat; GSLB doesn't ALWAYS suck — just more often than you'd think, for these reasons.....
Performance
G-Zip Compression and Load Balancing
A couple of customers asked if our appliances would do G-Zip compression. In the past we hadn't given it much thought until someone offered us a card to test it!..
Performance
EC2 load balancer appliance rocks, and its FREE... for now anyway.
I’m excited and slightly scared by our latest product! Excited because I've become slightly addicted to launching multiple instances in different parts of the world and load balancing the traffic seamlessly. Scared because this could change our whole business model...
Layer 4
How to enable SNAT in LVS (xt_ipvs) and iptables
The vast majority of layer 4 load balancers use LVS in two-arm NAT mode...
HAProxy
Load balancing Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with HAProxy
Here at Loadbalancer.org we have recently started the certification process of our product with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)...
Open source
Load balancing Windows Terminal Server — HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker
When you have users depending on Windows Terminal Services for their main desktop, it's a good idea to have more than one Terminal Server. RDP, however, is not an easy protocol to load balance...
HAProxy
Transparent proxy of SSL traffic using Pound to HAProxy backend patch and how-to
I've previously blogged about how to get TPROXY and HAProxy working nicely together, but what if you want to terminate SSL traffic on the load balancer to use HAProxy to insert cookies in the standard HTTP stream to the backend servers?..
High Availability
Loadbalancer.org guarantee 99.999% (5 nines) uptime to all of our customers
Some vendors make a fair bit of hype about their products enabling 99.999% availability out of the box...
HAProxy
Configure HAProxy with TPROXY kernel for full transparent proxy
If you use HAProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer...
How-tos
LVS Local node patch for Linux 2.6.25, Centos 5 kernel build how-to
Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Virtual Server) don't have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node...
Direct Server Return
Load balancing via Direct Routing has several key advantages over NAT based methods
One of the (many) traditional problems with load balancing is the requirement to change your infrastructure in order to implement a hardware load balancer...
Direct Server Return
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return — How to solve the ARP problem on Windows Server 2022
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return (DSR) aka. N-Path is a great load balancing method. And it is, without doubt, the fastest method possible...
Performance
Why Layer 7 load balancing sucks...
Hardware marketing execs get very excited about the fact that their product can magically scale your application by using ‘amazing Layer 7 technology’ in the load balancer such as cookie inserts and tracking/re-writing...