Introducing Mantrid (runtime-configurable, Python load balancer)

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65 points·andrewgodwin··8 comments

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).

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/

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.

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

Does this support sticky sessions?

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

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.

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

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.

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