Load Balancer
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What is a good Load balancer Do i need to get a physical device or can it be software driven?
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
What is a good Load balancer Do i need to get a physical device or can it be software driven?
Requirements? Expected result? Local, colo or cloud? HTTP(S) or something else?
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How do you plan to use this? There are many different types of load balancers on the market. If you are only doing web, you can use Nginx, for example. But if you are doing something else, you would not look at Nginx.
HAProxy is the leader in the free, open source load balancer space and is used by some of the biggest, most demanding environments so is pretty much always a good place to at least look.
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my plans is for all traffic. cpanel traffic . ms project server, my dev server vpn access etc. I am in the process of making a cdn. server to speed up my load times on my current environment, my website take forever to load.
I have 100mb fiber -
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I am also using cloudlinx wind cpanel and I have litespeed as my httpd
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
my plans is for all traffic. cpanel traffic . ms project server, my dev server vpn access etc. I am in the process of making a cdn. server to speed up my load times on my current environment, my website take forever to load.
I have 100mb fiber -
Could you elaborate a bit? A CDN is something huge, requiring at least 2 datacenters (or hosts) across the globe in my opinion. I'm just asking, this is not to offend you. One of the common features of a CDN is geolocation, reducing the amount of hops between your application and the user.
We can aid you better when we have a bit more information
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Sure Not offended at all. I have websites running cloudlinux. using cpanel. Websites load times are very slow. They all are using wordpress. from what i have been reading to speed up wordpress i need to implement a cdn. and page caching.
That is number one.
second is I am running an ms project server 2010. Server is very slow loading any pages.
That is pretty much my set up
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
my plans is for all traffic. cpanel traffic . ms project server, my dev server vpn access etc. I am in the process of making a cdn. server to speed up my load times on my current environment, my website take forever to load.
I have 100mb fiber -
I would look into what is taking so long to load before hiding it behind a CDN. If you don't fix it now, it will be harder later.
You don't load balance all of this stuff the same. You deal with it workload by workload.
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
Sure Not offended at all. I have websites running cloudlinux. using cpanel. Websites load times are very slow. They all are using wordpress. from what i have been reading to speed up wordpress i need to implement a cdn. and page caching.
WordPress is pretty fast under normal circumstances. Using tools like cPanel and pre-built hosts is not how you get WordPress fast, normally. You need a lot of control over your environment.
Before you look at stuff like CDN and LB (LB won't help here for speed, only for reliability, until you have scaling issues) you need to get WP tight and fast. This means tuning your stack, getting your database fast (this is often where the performance issues are and CDN/load balancing and such will do zero for you here) and adding appropriate tooling for speed (like page caching that you mentioned, locally.) Which PHP you are using matters a lot, for example.
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
Sure Not offended at all. I have websites running cloudlinux. using cpanel. Websites load times are very slow. They all are using wordpress. from what i have been reading to speed up wordpress i need to implement a cdn. and page caching.
That is number one.
second is I am running an ms project server 2010. Server is very slow loading any pages.
That is pretty much my set up
Ok, first off, 100MBit (sync I guess?) is not much. I'm on 1 and 10G dark fiber and I'm only hosting very small things on premise. Not because of the bandwith (even 10G is nothing for a large site) but because of the missing redundancy.
Next, I wouldn't build a CDN myself, but use something well known. Now, we need to break things up, let's discuss your website first and leave MS Project behind for now, that's a whole different story.
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
second is I am running an ms project server 2010. Server is very slow loading any pages.
None of this will affect that at all from your description in other threads. You will be spinning your wheels. If Project Server is slow, you need to figure out what. Adding CDN won't work for PS, it will have to be bypassed completely. And LB will just cause you to have to buy more licenses, but won't speed anything up.
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@thwr said in Load Balancer:
Next, I wouldn't build a CDN myself, but use something well known. Now, we need to break things up, let's discuss your website first and leave MS Project behind for now, that's a whole different story.
I don't think, or at least it wasn't my impression, that he was going to build a CDN himself. Just going to start using one.
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@scottalanmiller said in Load Balancer:
@thwr said in Load Balancer:
Next, I wouldn't build a CDN myself, but use something well known. Now, we need to break things up, let's discuss your website first and leave MS Project behind for now, that's a whole different story.
I don't think, or at least it wasn't my impression, that he was going to build a CDN himself. Just going to start using one.
Probably not
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@thwr said in Load Balancer:
Ok, first off, 100MBit (sync I guess?) is not much.
Should be plenty fast for a normal WordPress site to feel really fast, though, until it hits huge scale. Ours is on GigE or faster, but the network isn't a bottleneck. ML does some insane traffic and has some very big bandwidth, but rarely touches it. You'd have some insane web traffic to get a 100Mb/s link saturated.
That said we would never run application hosting in house either, it would always be in a hosted datacenter.
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@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
Sure Not offended at all. I have websites running cloudlinux. using cpanel. Websites load times are very slow. They all are using wordpress. from what i have been reading to speed up wordpress i need to implement a cdn. and page caching.
That is number one.
second is I am running an ms project server 2010. Server is very slow loading any pages.
That is pretty much my set up
So like @scottalanmiller said, you should investigate your installation and see what's up there. There are loads of guides on how to tune wordpress, like investigating your database's behavior, your webserver, your PHP interpreter and so one.
Another common thing to do is to use a caching engine plugin like "W3 Total Cache". Next on the list could be a static content caching CDN like CloudFlare (CF is NOT a traditional CDN). Finally, you can go for a full blown CDN which is running multiple instances of your website on their servers. But this will come with a large price tag.
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Load balancing and CDNs are only useful for scaling (getting applications to remain fast); not for initial performance. If the goal is to scale up, you need the applications to be fast initially before working on the scaling aspects.
Anything that is going to be used internally, don't bother with these things for that. CDNs are not useful for internal apps, only hosted ones. And load balancing is only useful when you have scaled past the capacity of a single system (for scaling purposes, they are useful for failover for web apps before then, which is why I recommended it previously, not for performance.)
To make MS Project Server faster, for example, you need to first identify what is making it slow (at a high level, this would have to be either the application server or the database server.) Then address that, normally by increasing RAM, CPU or IOPS, to get it fast enough. Easy peasy and done.
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@thwr said in Load Balancer:
@mroth911 said in Load Balancer:
Sure Not offended at all. I have websites running cloudlinux. using cpanel. Websites load times are very slow. They all are using wordpress. from what i have been reading to speed up wordpress i need to implement a cdn. and page caching.
That is number one.
second is I am running an ms project server 2010. Server is very slow loading any pages.
That is pretty much my set up
So like @scottalanmiller said, you should investigate your installation and see what's up there. There are loads of guides on how to tune wordpress, like investigating your database's behavior, your webserver, your PHP interpreter and so one.
Another common thing to do is to use a caching engine plugin like "W3 Total Cache". Next on the list could be a static content caching CDN like CloudFlare (CF is NOT a traditional CDN). Finally, you can go for a full blown CDN which is running multiple instances of your website on their servers. But this will come with a large price tag.
You can, in some cases, also replace your WP system with a fully static site that is generated by a remote WordPress system. This is pretty slick and allows for basically the entire site to be moved to CDN cacheable. But it takes more effort to manage. And only works for some kinds of sites.
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For MS Project Server, you will likely want to move to a single VM for the entire workload rather than having two. Having two isn't beneficial because there isn't any scaling to be done, you just want to get a small scale working quickly. So reducing the OS overhead, and the network overhead and the communications latency between the application and the database is beneficial. You can put in less effort, less money and get better performance out of fewer resources.
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It should be mentioned because it is an important approach, that for most of us, any talk of needing WordPress, cPanel and generic PHP web hosted would send us to providers like A Small Orange (that's who we use at NTG) to handle that for us. Fully hosted, full support and already tuned for around $5 - $10/mo. You get all of the load balancing, tools, cPanel licensing and such included. Hard to beat.
