Load-Balancing

BoostEdge offers extremely powerful level-7 load balancing. It is easy to use, intuitive and effective.

Load balancing has two main objectives:

Increasing load holding
Guaranteeing high availability

In both cases, the principle is the same: distributing requests over several functionally equivalent servers. This distribution can be achieved using various methods. These take into account the power of the servers: a more powerful server receives more requests.

Clustering

Clustering (also called web division or web partition) involves bringing together functionally equivalent servers to create a cluster. For example, you can create a group of servers to process only PHP scripts, another cluster can be created to process a different part of the application, and so on.

Partitioning an application or a site is the first level of load distribution based on the URL. This type of distribution is called "URL based load-balancing". It is also the first stage in implementing load balancing. Once a cluster has been defined, you simply need to specify the method to be used to distribute the load in the cluster configuration.

Session Tracking

Session tracking is required where information relating to the application session is held by servers and cannot be shared. Session monitoring can be based on:

Hashing the source IP address.
A private session cookie
Application cookie
SSL session ID

Server checking

This functionality is generally referred to as "health checking". It involves monitoring servers and applications to make sure that they are operating correctly. A test request is sent periodically to each server. Any servers that have stopped or failed are no longer used. The load distribution is adjusted automatically.

The URL used for the test and the test frequency can both be configured. BoostEdge sends a request to the server at regular intervals and checks that the response received is correct. Any server that does not respond correctly will no longer be called by the BoostEdge load balancer.