Introducing Mantrid (runtime-configurable, Python load balancer)

[andrewgodwin]

http://www.aeracode.org/2011/11/2/introducing-mantrid/

[andrewgodwin]

In the article I cover why we moved away from HaProxy; someone's also asked me why we didn't choose Nginx. It's because we needed HTTP/1.1 support to the backend (for things like WebSockets), which Nginx doesn't have (yet).

[po]

To give some context, Andrew Godwin is the guy behind the Django database migrations library South. This looks interesting and I'm excited to see what other gems they open-source.

Some talks he's given: http://lanyrd.com/profile/andrewgodwin/slides/

[tomazmuraus]

Just FYI, apache mod_proxy_balancer also supports HTTP 1.1 and you can configure it during run-time if you have mod_status enabled.

[andrewgodwin → tomazmuraus]

Ah, interesting, everyone always seems to forget apache. I imagine it still doesn't support the holding-connections-open-during-bootup bit, though?

[megaman821]

Does this support sticky sessions?

What are the balancing options are available (weighted round robin, least connections, etc.)?

[andrewgodwin → megaman821]

There's no sticky sessions, and the balancing is purely random (so statistically roughly the same as a round-robin) - it was primarily designed for large numbers of small backends, rather than one or two sites with ten backends, though we'll be adding in more balancing types as we go.

[megaman821 → andrewgodwin]

By purely random, you mean not weighted, so all your backends need to be roughly equal in capabilities?

[andrewgodwin → megaman821]

Exactly, as at Epio all our backends are identically sized. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone - but it's easy to add that code.