Oleksiy Kovyrin

Yet Another Admin's Blog

HAProxy – The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

Posted by Oleksiy Kovyrin under Networks · русский

While I’ve been doing performance testing of different Ruby on Rails deployment schemes, I came across very interesting software – HAProxy.

HAProxy is a TCP/HTTP reverse proxy which is particularly suited for high
availability environments. Indeed, it can :
– route HTTP requests depending on statically assigned cookies ;
– spread the load among several servers while assuring server persistence
through the use of HTTP cookies ;
– switch to backup servers in the event a main one fails ;
– accept connections to special ports dedicated to service monitoring ;
– stop accepting connections without breaking existing ones ;
– add/modify/delete HTTP headers both ways ;
– block requests matching a particular pattern ;

It needs very little resource. Its event-driven architecture allows it to easily
handle thousands of simultaneous connections on hundreds of instances without
risking the system’s stability.

As for me, I’m really impressed by HAProxy’s performance and I will suggest to try to use it in some high-availability environments because of its performance and set of features. Take a look at this software – it is really good tool!

Related posts:

  1. Fiddler – HTTP Debugging Proxy
  2. High-Performance Ruby On Rails Setups Test: mongrel vs lighttpd vs nginx
  3. Typical Configurations Overview For Nginx HTTP(S) Reverse Proxy/Web Server
  4. Using Nginx As Reverse-Proxy Server On High-Loaded Sites
  5. MySQL Performance Blog – Great resource for MySQL DBAs

8 Responses to this entry

kotnik says:

Willy Tarreau made this software, and he’s our new 2.4 kernel maintainer. That sounds prommising :)

Jean Verger says:

Hi …
I’ve heard so much of HA Proxy … many websites talks about it, recomment to use it … I have checked the web sites, read the manuals and … guess what … not a single example or configuration file in the whole world wide web :) )

any one knows of some samples on how to use it?

thanks,

Jean

Ian says:

This software seems perfect for my needs but after studying the readme’s and docs for an hour I am no closer to even understanding how you install it. I checked out the above article but that’s Debian and I’m running Centos 5.1, I tried running it install as:

make TARGET=linux26 CPU=i686 REGEX=static-pcre

..but that does not work for some reason :( .

James says:

I have chosen HAProxy for a site that is launching next week.

16 APP Servers handling the donations for a major fund raising event. Last year they took $6 million.

Oh and the site is only up for 5 hours :)

It’s an excellent piece of software, I’m very very surprised at the performance and ease of use.