Forum OpenACS Q&A: Load balancing with NGINX

I have written up a document on how to do load balancing with NGINX instead of pound and what you need to remember when running it before an OpenACS site.

Could those few of us who run a load balanced site please chime in and tell me what else we need to think about for the load balanced OpenACS solution?

http://cognovis.de/developer/en/nginx-loadbalancing

I would love to, but I can't because that would imply that I had knowledge of POUND.

NGINX was chosen by me because I heard a lot of good things and the documentation for what I needed was easy to understand (I needed the ability to run multiple site behind one IP address, based on host name). From there on I explored more of it's capabilities (run static files from its own directory, act as a reverse proxy to shape traffic, act as a real load balancer, cache images on the harddisk) and with each single step the conf files grew a little bit but are still easy to understand.

Good things I heard: It is blazingly fast and does not harm the resources. It also doubles as an IMAP proxy and has FastCGI support built in. I can verify the blazingly fast. It serves 10 pages per second as a load balancer with cache on a Pentium 4 with 2GB of Ram and the load seldomly gets beyond 0.05, not to mention that pages come up much faster than with just one AOLserver.

Hi Malte,

the link to nginx-loadbalancing is broken.

Could you kindly repair it or send me a copy?

TIA

Claudio Pasolini

From what I understand, Pound is a load-balancing tool whilst Nginx is in fact a fully featured web server in its own right.

Nginx therefore addresses a much larger problem set than Pound whilst still proving extremely efficient and 'easy-to-configure' reverse-proxy and load sharing capabilities.

Nginx seems to be particularly well suited to acting as a front-end dispatcher, serving static resources itself and handing off other requests to other webservers behind the scenes. So if you have a whole load of different technologies in action (e.g. some OpenACS services, perhaps a PHP service and some other CGI based content), Nginx can serve the static resources immediately, and can reverse-proxy the other requests to the various backend webservers. This can be done whilst preserving the integrity of your access logs.

Furthermore, Nginx can be configured to handle the ssl element of https transactions so that you can have a single certificate providing encrypted access to several backend servers without having to configure an https listener on each one.

Just a few of my first thoughts.

Hope it helps
R.