A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels

Back in August, I posted about a good-sized evaluation I was going to start doing about the horizontal scaling of different proxy engines and load-balancers across lots of mongrels.

But in short, we’ve stayed with F5’s BIG-IPs for at least one additional reason beyond their ability to handled gigabits of traffic across many many backend servers, and that additional reason is the ability to see inside packets and write iRules. iRules that can scrub http-reponse outs for credit card numbers and replace them with a “NOT ALLOWED TEXT”; iRules that can direct API traffic, bot traffic and traffic from specific user-agents to different backend pools (so you can separate API traffic from what people are hitting in a web browser), and iRules that can send .gif, .jpeg, .png off to different backend pools. All without any code changes, and this is just touching on some of the capabilities.

And to give you a general performance example, we recently added another 48 mongrels on 6 Joyent Accelerators behind a single public IP address to a set of BIG-IPs that are already directing 100s of Mbps of traffic, and without even getting around to tuning yet or caring about the backend numbers and configuration, we’re able to do quick 1 second bursts (like below), and then 10 seconds, 100 seconds, 1000 seconds, and one hour running benchmarks and get numbers like these below:

Total: connections 4000 requests 4000 replies 4000 test-duration 1.023 s

Connection rate: 3908.6 conn/s (0.3 ms/conn, <=99 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 2.0 avg 6.0 max 66.3 median 3.5 stddev 9.4
Connection time [ms]: connect 0.5
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000

Request rate: 3908.6 req/s (0.3 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 85.0

Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 0.0 max 0.0 stddev 0.0 (0 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 4.8 transfer 0.7
Reply size [B]: header 216.0 content 7850.0 footer 0.0 (total 8066.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=4000 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0

CPU time [s]: user 0.39 system 0.59 (user 38.5% system 58.0% total 96.5%)
Net I/O: 31112.6 KB/s (254.9*10^6 bps)

Yes that’s the sub page of a rails application doing almost 4000 requests/second. But it’s also a small page with a blip text and a couple of small small avatarish images.



Post written by jason