Can I run SPECweb or other benchmarks through the balancer?

Yes. However, it's not as simple as just(!) setting up SPECweb and letting it run. SPECweb99 is not suited for clustering, so you may not get the results you hope for.

SPECweb has two main parts; static and dynamic content. The static files delivered by the web servers can easily be load-balanced across several back-ends, and the balancer could be used to distribute the load. However, the dynamic content is troublesome - there are requests that must read and store state on the back-ends, so this state must be accessibile by all the back-ends. A simple solution to this would be to NFS-export the document root of the test across the machines. However, this would severely affect performance and reducing the benefit of the load balancer.

To date, no SPECweb99 submissions have made use of any load balancer from any hardware or software vendor.

Content Manager [Administrator] 12 August 2005 Bookmark with del.icio.us Post this article to Digg Post this article to reddit Post this article to Facebook Tweet this article  

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