Load Balance between tomcat instances on HP-UX 11.0

[Michael Campbell]

Hi

We have a HP-UX 11.0 server with two Tomcat instances (apache-tomcat-4.1.36) running on it, listening for two different applications. Reponse times are very slow and our applications hang while queueing, waiting for Tomcat. I have created two more tomcat instances for each of these applications but I would like to be able to load balance between them so that each application could be pointed to one port but would be automatically ditributed acorss the three ports in a Round-Robin fashion.

I am new to this web server stuff and so any basic instructions would be much appreciated.

Regards

Michael

[Torsten.]

Does this help?

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/balancer-howto.html

[TTr]

I think you need to set up load balancing at the application level rather than the tomcat level. Check with the application if it has any balancing capabilities, some of them do. If not you have to rely on external load balancing mechanisms. You can utilize DNS by assigning the two IPs of each tomcat server to the same name and use that name in your application servers. Or you can consider a load balancing appliance such as F5. With either solution you have to test heavily with the app to validate that it works. You app vendor may have some suggestions about load balancing as well.

[Michael Campbell]

TTr

Unfortunately the application is a bit rubbish and doesn't have any load-balancing capabilities. Also, all the tomcat instances are on the same server with a single IP address and so DNS can't really sort the issue out. Thanks for the reply though.

Torsten

Thanks for the link, i'll have a look through it. I'm just new to the web server stuff though (yesterday!) so it may take a while for me to go through it all.

Regards

Michael