[thelist] aol, session tracking, and load-balacing

Ken Schaefer Ken at adOpenStatic.com
Wed Jan 9 02:36:45 CST 2008



-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Brian Cummiskey
Sent: Wednesday, 9 January 2008 5:28 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] aol, session tracking, and load-balacing

Anthony Baratta wrote:
> > The other way is to move to DB sessions, so you can hit either web
>> server and get the proper session info from the Database.
>
> I'm not sure we're ready to do that.  From a load perspective, that
> would add literally 5 million update/select queries a day.

That's not a lot, to be honest.

Most large scale applications would not store session state in memory on the web tier. That makes the each web server stateless, and you can more easily swap in/out front end boxes.

With a low-end database cluster, you can handle several thousand requests a second (and still be able to save and rehydrate sessions on the fly). I've seen that done on a few projects.

Obviously there is a cost involved :-)

One option might be to have your load balancer send all requests from AOL subnets to a single web server.

Cheers
Ken



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