Chapter 10 Achieving Optimum Performance with PowerDynamo

Load balancing

Load balancing - that is, running PowerDynamo on systems with multiple processors or across multiple server machines - can be extremely effective for improving PowerDynamo performance.

Load balancing across processors

The multithreaded design of PowerDynamo makes the use of a multiple processor system an excellent candidate for improving the performance of a PowerDynamo Web site.

Each request to a PowerDynamo application is received on an individual thread (worker threads). Because of this, PowerDynamo requests are evenly spread among the available processors.

Figure 10-4: Distributing PowerDynamo requests to worker threads

Load balancing across servers

Another setup for improving the performance of a Web site by load balancing is the using PowerDynamo with multiple Web servers. The use of PowerDynamo with a load balancing mechanism such as the Cisco LocalDirector enables TCP/IP traffic to be distributed across multiple low-cost servers.

Figure 10-5: Load balancing Web servers

Further information on the Cisco LocalDirector can be found at the following URL: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/751/lodir/index.html.