Stueyb

Hi peeps,

Just a simple question I think. I have a server that is used for downloading films, at the moment its not in productions officially but its still maxing out at an average of 5 MBit/ S.

It actually works out cheaper to buy a new server and balance the load, but loads balancers are expensive. SO....

I want to use a algorythm to randomly choose the download server. Question is, asuming a total ramdomnes, will the odds end up averaging out around 50pc per server ?

milo

your algorithm will get 50% of requests routed to the right server. so you get 1000 requests, and 500 go to each. but whats to say that the 500 that go to server 1 disconnect after 5 seconds, and the 500 that go to server 2 all stay connected for an hour. request #1001 comes in, and there's a 50% chance it will go to the overused server 2, and a 50% chance it goes to the unused server 1.

stevencotton

You could use DNS round robin as a basic form of load balancing. If you need something a bit more complicated you could try Apache and mod_backhand.