Hello, I'm new here so I hope these questions are ok for this place (found you in google, looks like theres a big helpful community here..) Im looking into setting up some loadbalanced webservers, I've been experimenting for a while and things are working but ive got some questions about how the ladbalancing actually works. (Oh and I've been using fedora if you wanted to know). 1. For a bandwidth heavy site, is it ok to have the main load balancing node on a slower connection? Would it be ok to have the node on 100mbit line and then the actual webservers on 200mbit lines - when a user requests a file the request will go through the load balancing node to the webserver but does it then go back from the webserver through the load balancing node then to the user? Or does it go directly from the webserver to the user? I'm assuming this is how it works otherwise it wouldnt really be "load balancing" and the fact during part of the setup there was a little bit about "ipv4 forwarding" - but i just want to check. 2. Whats the best way to make sure all the servers have the same files? For exmaple someone uploads an avatar to a forum, it will only end up on 1 server, so you would only see it if your request for the image was being handled by the same server... Thanks!
Most datacenters give load balancing for an extra cost, you might wanna ask the datacenter you are leasing the server from...
They do (its free too) but they only load balance port 80 between upto 8 servers - and id prefer to have more control. Both ways have fail over detection anyway. My question basically helps me decided which route to take, if requests go back directly from the webserver to client then ill do the loadbalancing myself otherwise ill let the datacentres routers do it.