- Joel on Load Balancing<P>I'm commenting on <A href="http://genehack.org/computers/software/joel-on-crack.html">a comment by John Stephen Jacobs Anderson</A> (who seems to have too many names) on <A href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/06/15.html">a comment by Joel</A> (who could use another) on load balancing. </P>
<P>Basically, Joel said that letting Windows take care of load balancing is better than using a hardware load balancer, because if your load balancer goes down, you're offline. I would tend to agree. John said that that's baloney, because if you have a load balancer, you have two of them.</P>
<P>But for a small shop, two load balancers is expensive, and doesn't actually add any benefit over letting Windows do it.</P>
<P>ASP.NET gives you <A href="http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20021016.asp">various ways to manage session state</A>, including serializing state into the database, so even if one of your machines goes down, a client in the middle of something that requires server side state doesn't lose anything.</P>
<P>Doing the load balancing is a little more work for the servers, but peanuts in the grand scheme of things. Joel's got a system that works, and saved himself the $$ of two hardware load balancers. Makes sense to me.</P>
<P> </P>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:09 GMT