Load Balancing with pound and Mongrel Clustering

In my previous post I have written about mongrel clustering..

Now if you want to add the load balancing feature to it you may use pound. Pound is a software HTTP Load Balancer and Reverse Proxy.

These are the steps how you can configure pound with mongrel cluster. First configure mongrel cluster as per the previous post.

Then download and install pound from http://www.apsis.ch/pound/Pound-2.0.9.tgz

Now the configuration step

Pound.cfg needs to be configured which will reside in /etc/pound/pound.cfg

also a symlink is required to be made

$ sudo ln -s /etc/pound/pound.cfg /usr/local/etc/pound.cfg

A basic version of pound.cfg will look something like this

User        "www-data"
Group       "www-data"
LogLevel    2
Alive       30

ListenHTTP
 Address 123.123.123.123
 Port    80
End

Service
 HeadRequire "Host:.*www.dhavalparikh.co.in.*"
 BackEnd
     Address 127.0.0.1
     Port    8080 
 End
 Session
     Type    BASIC
     TTL     300  
 End
End

Service
 URL ".*.mov"
 BackEnd
     Address 69.12.146.109
     Port    8081 
 End
 Session
     Type    BASIC
     TTL     300  
 End
End

Service
 # Catch All
 BackEnd
     Address 127.0.0.1
     Port    9000 
 End  
 BackEnd
     Address 127.0.0.1
     Port    9001
 End
 Session
     Type    BASIC
     TTL     300
 End


Then start pound with the following command

$ sudo /etc/init.d/pound start

finally you will have mongrel cluster setup done so start mongrel cluster

sudo mongrel_rails cluster::start

Thats it you mongrel cluster with pound configuration is done..
njoi the power of load balancing