[Seaside] Apache Load Balancing with Seaside

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Sat Nov 12 10:14:36 UTC 2016


On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 10:01 AM, jtuchel at objektfabrik.de
<jtuchel at objektfabrik.de> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> we're finally at a stage where we need load balancing is not only needed but
> also needs to be a bit more fine-grained.
>
> So far, we've used Apache's mod_proxy_balancer with an byrequests balancing
> scheme and the simply Set Cookie, but this is not really distributing load
> in an even manner, because it simply does a round robin based on requests.
> Teh way I seem to understand this, this just sends every nth request to
> another backend, unless the sticky session cookie is there.
>
> This seems to have multiple problems in the context of Seaside:
>
> 1. each page render consits of dozens of requests, and at least 2 in case of
> the usual redirect/render cycle
>
> 2. So request != new seaside session and therefor not a good base for
> distribting load
>
> 3. It seems the Cokie as marker for stickyness is browser wide. Every new
> session started in teh same browser gets directed to the same seaside image
>
> So this starts to cause problems in our scenario because there is always one
> image (the first one in the http.conf) that handles most of the load, no
> matter how many images we add.
>
> I think I understand that URL encoding for the load balancer would fit much
> better for Seaside. What's even better is the fact that Seaside already uses
> the _s parameter to identify a session.
>
> So at first sight, I think it might be a good idea to use the _s parameter
> provided by Seaside as the URL parameter that is also used for session
> stickyness.
>
> This brings up a few questions:
>
> * Is this a good idea?
> * Has anybody tried?
> * How to configure this?
>
> The most important question, however, is this: would this be any better wrt
> workload distribution? I mean, how could we make sure the very first request
> gets redirected to a new image? My fear is that in the end this will still
> have the same problem: the initial sessions will still be mostly created by
> the same image all of the time. The only difference might finally just be
> the fact that we use URL parameters instead of Cookies and spend nights
> testing and stuff and end up with the same problems...
>
> Before you suggest using squid or the like, let's think about the basic
> problem: does squid do things differently? What mechanism there is so much
> better than counting requests, measuring bytes transferrred or such?
>
> So how do people solve this problem? Any ideas, hints, experiences are
> greatly appreciated

Unless you run on GemStone/S you need sticky sessions because there is
generally a lot session related state required to service requests.
That state is image local.
Making mod_proxy_balancer do sticky sessions is fairly trivial, simply
add a route to the session id. Have a look at the
WARouteHandlerTrackingStragety hierarchy in the Seaside-Cluster [1]
package. Then you'll just need to make sure that requests without a
session are evenly distributed across images.
There are still issues left. First you can't dynamically add and
remove images. Second when an image has more load than an other for
whatever reason you can't tell mod_proxy_balancer to favour the less
strained images for new sessions. mod_cluster allows you to do this,
but I have only an incomplete and buggy implementation.

 [1] http://www.squeaksource.com/ajp.html

Cheers
Philippe


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