Load Balancing Strategies

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  1. Load Balancing Strategies

This article details various load balancing strategies applicable to a MediaWiki installation. Effective load balancing is crucial for high availability, scalability, and performance, particularly for larger wikis with significant traffic. This guide is geared towards system administrators and server engineers new to the concept.

What is Load Balancing?

Load balancing distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server bears too much demand. This improves responsiveness, prevents overload, and enhances the overall user experience. For a MediaWiki installation, this typically involves distributing web server requests (Apache or Nginx) across multiple backend servers running the web frontend and potentially database queries across multiple database servers (though database load balancing is a separate, more complex topic – see Database replication and Database clustering).

Common Load Balancing Strategies

Several strategies exist, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Choosing the right strategy depends on your specific needs and infrastructure.

Round Robin

This is the simplest strategy. It distributes requests sequentially to each server in the pool. Think of it like dealing cards – each server gets a turn.

Pros Cons
Simple to implement. Doesn't account for server load. Doesn't consider server health.

While easy to set up, Round Robin can be inefficient if servers have varying capacities or if one server is experiencing issues. See Apache Load Balancing for configuration examples.

Least Connections

This strategy directs requests to the server with the fewest active connections. This aims to distribute load more evenly, as servers handling fewer requests are likely less busy.

Pros Cons
Distributes load based on current activity. Can be more complex to implement than Round Robin. Still doesn't account for server capacity.

This is a good starting point for many deployments, especially when servers are relatively homogeneous. Consider using a load balancer like HAProxy to implement this.

Weighted Round Robin/Least Connections

This strategy builds upon the previous two by assigning weights to each server. Servers with higher weights receive more requests. This allows you to leverage servers with greater processing power or bandwidth.

Server Weight Description
Server A 2 Powerful server with more CPU and RAM.
Server B 1 Standard server.
Server C 1 Standard server.

Using weights allows for a flexible and optimized distribution of load. Nginx load balancing can easily handle weighted configurations.

IP Hash

This strategy uses the client's IP address to determine which server receives the request. This ensures that a given client consistently connects to the same server. This can be useful for applications that rely on session state, but it can create uneven load distribution if clients are concentrated in a few IP ranges.

Least Response Time

This strategy directs requests to the server with the lowest average response time. This is a more advanced strategy that requires monitoring server response times. It's often implemented with sophisticated load balancers. See Load balancer selection for advice.

Common Load Balancing Software

Several software solutions can implement these strategies.

  • HAProxy: A popular, high-performance load balancer.
  • Nginx: Can function as both a web server and a load balancer.
  • Apache with `mod_proxy_balancer`: Apache can also be configured for load balancing.
  • Varnish Cache: While primarily a caching server, Varnish can also act as a basic load balancer.

MediaWiki Specific Considerations

  • **Session Management:** If you're using PHP sessions, ensure they are shared across all servers. Options include using Memcached, Redis, or a database-backed session handler. Without shared sessions, users may be logged out unexpectedly when their requests are routed to different servers.
  • **$wgSessionCacheType:** In your `LocalSettings.php` file, configure the session cache type to a shared storage solution.
  • **Sticky Sessions (IP Hash):** While sometimes useful, be aware that IP hash can cause issues with users behind NAT or proxies.
  • **Caching:** Leverage Varnish Cache or other caching mechanisms to reduce the load on your servers.
  • **Database Load:** Remember that load balancing only addresses the web frontend. Database performance is equally important. Consider Database replication for read scaling.
  • **Configuration Consistency:** Ensure that all your MediaWiki servers have identical configurations. Use a configuration management tool like Ansible or Puppet to automate this process.
  • **Monitoring:** Implement monitoring tools to track server load, response times, and error rates. Prometheus and Grafana are common choices.
  • **Regular Health Checks:** Configure your load balancer to perform regular health checks on your MediaWiki servers. This ensures that only healthy servers receive traffic.

Example Configuration Snippet (Nginx)

```nginx upstream wiki_backend { 

   server server1.example.com weight=2;
   server server2.example.com;
   server server3.example.com;

}

server { 

   listen 80;
   server_name wiki.example.com;

   location / {
       proxy_pass http://wiki_backend;
   }

} ```

This simple Nginx configuration distributes traffic across three servers, with `server1.example.com` receiving twice as much traffic as the other two.

Further Reading


Intel-Based Server Configurations

Configuration Specifications Benchmark
Core i7-6700K/7700 Server 64 GB DDR4, NVMe SSD 2 x 512 GB CPU Benchmark: 8046
Core i7-8700 Server 64 GB DDR4, NVMe SSD 2x1 TB CPU Benchmark: 13124
Core i9-9900K Server 128 GB DDR4, NVMe SSD 2 x 1 TB CPU Benchmark: 49969
Core i9-13900 Server (64GB) 64 GB RAM, 2x2 TB NVMe SSD
Core i9-13900 Server (128GB) 128 GB RAM, 2x2 TB NVMe SSD
Core i5-13500 Server (64GB) 64 GB RAM, 2x500 GB NVMe SSD
Core i5-13500 Server (128GB) 128 GB RAM, 2x500 GB NVMe SSD
Core i5-13500 Workstation 64 GB DDR5 RAM, 2 NVMe SSD, NVIDIA RTX 4000

AMD-Based Server Configurations

Configuration Specifications Benchmark
Ryzen 5 3600 Server 64 GB RAM, 2x480 GB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 17849
Ryzen 7 7700 Server 64 GB DDR5 RAM, 2x1 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 35224
Ryzen 9 5950X Server 128 GB RAM, 2x4 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 46045
Ryzen 9 7950X Server 128 GB DDR5 ECC, 2x2 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 63561
EPYC 7502P Server (128GB/1TB) 128 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 48021
EPYC 7502P Server (128GB/2TB) 128 GB RAM, 2 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 48021
EPYC 7502P Server (128GB/4TB) 128 GB RAM, 2x2 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 48021
EPYC 7502P Server (256GB/1TB) 256 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 48021
EPYC 7502P Server (256GB/4TB) 256 GB RAM, 2x2 TB NVMe CPU Benchmark: 48021
EPYC 9454P Server 256 GB RAM, 2x2 TB NVMe

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