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there are 4 servers with the same hardware configurations, and a ipvs based lvs system is constructed on these 4 servers using NAT. my question is simple: will there be very high load on the front server which was in charge of transferring traffic to the whole lvs system?

xpu
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1 Answers1

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To be clear: You're setting up a single server to act as load balancer, using Linux' IPVS kernel module? And the load balancer has around 4 or so backend HTTP servers behind it?

No, that shouldn't be a problem at all. IPVS does load balancing at the TCP/IP level, so it's capable of very high packet rates on modest servers. Handling 4 backend servers should be no problem.

  • thank you very much for your reply. 4 backend server structure is no problem, but since i use NAT, the front server could be a bottleneck for that it must handle both the requests and the responses, as the lvs document mentioned ;-) – xpu Oct 17 '11 at 05:30
  • @xpu: I agree, the NAT'ing means the load balancer has som additional work to do. Even so, with just 4 backend servers, there should be no capacity problems on the load balancer. Of course, you're not providing any data, so I'm using my best guess for "normal" HTTP traffic -- if you're dealing with extremely high connection rates and very small objects, then things may be different. I doubt it, but you should always get measurements. –  Oct 17 '11 at 08:21
  • yeap, it should be enough for normal traffice, and should be more ok than nginx – xpu Oct 17 '11 at 08:44