Load Balancing
Written by wwwhostingdirectory.com
When a system gets too much traffic to handle, it will become overloaded. This is common sense. We come across this every day when we’re working on our computers. When there are too many program’s running, the system will be overloaded, and will become very slow. We also see this on websites. When a website has a lot of traffic, the response each person gets is much slower. If you think back to the American Idol voting websites, you’ll know exactly what this means! There were millions and millions of users online right after every show, and even with a dedicated server and a full team of professionals on the job all the time, it was overloaded and retrieving each piece of information the user wanted seemed to take years.
If there are too many requests to handle at one time, your website can be overloaded, too. This problem is usually seen as a scalability problem. Scalability is the property which ensures that a system or a network can handle steadily increasing amounts of work, or steadily decreasing amount of work, or can be enlarged and contracted easily to make sure that the work can be handled optimally. Overloading is a load scalability problem.
The solution is load balancing, which is part of optimization. Optimization is simply any method of modifying a system so that it performs better. Load balancing is a way of handling the increasing number of hits a website gets. There are different ways of load balancing. Usually, the best way is to use a combination of different methods of load balancing. You have to see what kinds of ways you are most comfortable with and optimize your computer best. The first requirement is that you must have the hardware required. If you’re using shared web hosting, you probably need to upgrade to either a dedicated server or to managed hosting. If you upgrade to managed hosting, your load balancing will be done by the service provider, but if you opt for dedicated server hosting with not extra support, you will get the hardware you require, but you will have to balance your load yourself. Common sense says that if one server is getting overloaded, you have to use more than one, as many as the traffic on your website says you need, and use software that will distribute the load between these servers. This is exactly what load balancing does, and there are different ways of doing this using different software.
The first is a Round Robin DNS. This distributes requests as evenly as possible among a specified number of squid cache servers. A squid is a proxy server. It can speed up your web server by catching repeated requests. This method can effectively balance your load, especially if you use it in combination with other methods. Squid cache servers measure response time in order to evenly distribute the requests between the servers you have, and squid servers can even deliver cached pages by themselves a good part of the time, without going to the server, thus preventing considerable overloading.
Having separate database servers is another way of load balancing. The PHP are what run the web servers. These PHP scripts distribute the requests between the database servers, with updates being sent to the master database server whenever necessary.
Using a layer 4 router is another way of balancing the load. A layer 4 router is a type of multi layer switch. A multi layer switch prioritizes packets of information. A layer 4 router prioritizes information and requests and sends them to different servers under the same IP address.
Load balancing is essential to keep your website running smoothly, especially after traffic picks up. The method you choose is up to you. There are many businesses that provide you with this service. If you choose to avail of these services, make sure that you understand what kind of load balancing they will do, and whether that is what will be best for your website. |
|
