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Hash Balancing with mod_proxy_core

mod_proxy and mod_proxy_core support 3 balancers to spread the load over multiple backends. One of them is Hash balancing which is very good for balancing the load of caching proxies like Squid.

If you compare the performance of Hash-Balancing to the classic round-robin balancing you should see a increase of the performance as the backends can use their caches a lot better. With RR each backend has to handle the full URL namespace, with Hash-Balancing only a part. This increases the cache-locality and the overall performance.

mod_proxy_core commited to svn

mod_proxy_core just got commited to SVN and is now available to testers. 

server.modules = ( ..., "mod_proxy_core", .. )

## works
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/proxyme/" {
  proxy-core.balancer = "round-robin"
  proxy-core.protocol = "http"
  proxy-core.backends = ( "wikipedia.org" )

  ## to be done
  proxy-core.rewrite-response = (
    "Location" => ( 
      "^http://en.wikipedia.org/(.*)" => "http://127.0.0.1:1025/$1" ) )
  proxy-core.rewrite-request = (
    "URI" => (
      "^/proxyme(/.*)" => "$1" ) )
}

Reverse-Proxying mod_proxy_core

I just added and commited the header rewriting support for mod_proxy_core. 

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/proxyme(/|$)" {
  proxy-core.balancer = "round-robin"
  proxy-core.protocol = "http"
  proxy-core.backends = ( "en.wikipedia.org" )
  proxy-core.rewrite-response = (
    "Location" => ( "^http://en.wikipedia.org/(.*)" => "http://127.0.0.1:1025/proxyme/$1" ),
  )
  proxy-core.rewrite-request = (
    "_uri" => ( "^/proxyme/?(.*)" => "/$1" ),
    "Host" => ( ".*" => "en.wikipedia.org" ),
 )
}

The New mod_proxy_core

One thing I heard from everyone at the railsconf was: Please fix mod_proxy. In my talk I presented a look into the future and how mod_proxy will evolve in lighty 1.5.x, unification of the backend-plugin, .,.

Well, perhaps it will be a bit earlier than 1.5.0

X-Sendfile

… or the hidden secrets of lighty.

X-Sendfile is one of the important, but mostly unknown features. Time to put the spot-light on it and see why you want to use it.

lighty on win32

At the railsconf I spent some time to work on the native win32 port of lighty. Thanks to scons we already had a working build system on Windows, it only needed some #ifdef’s to get the beast compiling.

What I learned at the railsconf

The railsconf 2006 is over and it was a amazing week here in Chicago. Around 500 attendees made the conference a huge success. Inspiraring Keynotes, interesting lightning talks and a amazing show by ‘Why the Lucky Stiff and the Thirsty Cups’.

A interactive PHP-Shell

I was always jealous of iruby and ipython, the interactive shells for Ruby and Python. Instead of writing a script and running it through the interpreters you just execute the script line-by-line while you write it.

For debugging this is great. Compare a shell-script against the normal shell usage. It is more a ‘What if I …’ pattern instead of ‘I can write 100 lines of code without testing it’.

PHP was missing a powerful shell for a long time now. I needed one for my team at work and ‘php -a’, the interactive shell of PHP 5.0.x, is still not able to handle basic FATAL errors like ‘Function foo() not found’. So I wrote a php based interactive php-shell