Load balancers are good for smaller sites too, to alleviate traffic bottenecks to a single server. Plus, since you can talk a server out of the rotation it make server upgrades alot less painful. Down time is minimized.
Don't forget you can also load balance almost anything, not just HTTP. Mail is another good candidate for load balancing, as well as FTP. Alot of load balancers also support content switching as well - basically, for all requests with 'www.sitename/%gif|jpg|png, redirect all those requests to another server.
Usually the possibilities are endless, and definitely makes complex environments easier to manage.
To those looking for the basics, just search on google. You can also setup rudimentary load balancing on your server / firewall to test it out, such as using round robin DNS and round robin NAT. Naturally, NAT and DNS aren't really aware of the health of your servers (being they were not designed for those functions) so if a server goes down requests will still go to it!
To the person asking if 10 P3 server behind a load balancer will out perform a PIV, the answer is yes, most definitely.
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Diehard FreeBSD User
Last edited by jmack : 01-31-2006 at 11:08 PM.
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