Linden Lab's Jeff Linden has announced scalability improvements to the website by the introduction of a load-balancing system. Presumably some sort of layer-three switching device, though it's not entirely clear as to whether they're using something like that or a reverse proxy.The way this works is that the load-balancing box appears to be the web-server that you'd normally talk to. Instead, when your web-browser starts talking to it, it sends your request to one of several identically configured web-servers to handle. This gives Linden Lab the flexibility of putting in more boxes at the back to handle increased web-traffic loads in future, without much messy mucking about.
Now, if only Cory and the dev team can manage their balancing act with the database servers.
1. Hmmm...I thought the database server was *already* a cluster. Certainly MySQL, which we know LL uses for the database, supports clustering (see http://www.mysql.com/products/database/cluster/ and http://www.howtoforge.com/loadbalanced_mysql_cluster_debian , among other sites).
I'd guess the load balancer they're using is something like an F5 BIG-IP (http://www.f5.com/products/bigip/). I know those work well; a company I used to work for used a pair of them to load-balance across a number of Web servers.
Posted at 1:18PM on Dec 22nd 2006 by Erbo Evans