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In 2006 a company I was working with setup two load balancers to balance traffic between two web servers. We used ultra monkey to do so.

I'm hoping to do the same now.

My question:

  • Would anyone recommend using ultra monkey to balance traffic between two linux boxes running apache?
  • Are there other linux-based alternatives which have since proven to be better for this task?
  • Would you still install debian sarge on a load balancer given it's age?

Thanks everyone!

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Ultra Monkey was essentially packaged ipvs. It hasn't been updated in a while. I suspect partially because ipvs was merged into the mainline kernel.

You can still use ipvs, ipvsadm, ldirectord and all that fun stuff for Layer 4 switching in Linux. LVS is my preferred solution but there are definitely alternative architectures depenending on your needs. These include HAProxy, Nginx, and Pound among others. Nginx is quite popular as well for highly available Web architectures.

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up vote 3 down vote

Check out haproxy http://haproxy.1wt.eu

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Hi, this looks really good, thanks for the recommendation. – Mark L Apr 22 '10 at 11:03
up vote 0 down vote

I have used Apache's mod_proxy extension mod_proxy_balancer for a number of years. I find it far easy to set up. Also, since I use Apache for the web servers I am already familiar with the technology. You still want to have a fail over for the lb server, so I peer it with another using HA (Heartbeat).

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