Balancing with Zeus ZXTM
Recently I started to run into issues with my load balancing solution. I was running HAProxy on a GoGrid instance and it was working pretty well. Eventually though as our traffic went up problems started to appear. After completing as many networking optimizations as I could it was clear that I needed to find another solution. I was debating between HAProxy on a dedicated server at ServePath, a self managed hardware load balancer or a managed load balancer from ServePath when another contender entered the ring.
The nice people at Zeus set me up with a trial of their ZXTM load balancing solution to try so I figured it was worth a shot. Setup was pretty easy well ok very easy on a fresh GoGrid instance, I made some networking configuration optimizations then went about setting up my pools. To ensure it wouldn’t just completely die with our traffic I set it up as a server under our existing HAProxy setup then just gradually ramped up the percentage of requests going to it. Once it was almost at 100% I made preparations and swapped it out with our HAProxy system.
There was immediately a noticeable improvement in latency which if you’ve read my blog before will know is very important to me. The interface was a pleasure to work with as well enabling me to easily monitor traffic levels and issues on our operations screen. After setup it was pretty much left to its own while I continued investigating the other solutions.
Performance wise it went very well. During the testing period we peaked at I believe around 4000 requests per second and commonly ran at over 2000 per second for hours at a time. While we had some slowdowns during this time it wasn’t anything dramatic and probably had more to do with running it on a virtual server than a problem with Zeus itself.
ZXTM also offers a pretty cool ability to move some application logic forward into the load balancer. Though it wasn’t suitable for my needs I could certainly think of a lot of uses in other situations.
In the end my month with ZXTM was certainly a good experience and I can strongly recommend their software. As for my setup, while I ended up going back to HAProxy only this time running it on dedicated hardware and it is still going strong.