Chapter 10 Achieving Optimum Performance with PowerDynamo

Load balancing

Load balancing--running PowerDynamo on systems with multiple processors or across multiple server machines--can be extremely effective for improving PowerDynamo performance.

Load balancing across processors

The multithreaded design of PowerDynamo makes the use of a multiple processor system an excellent candidate for improving the performance of a PowerDynamo Web site.

Each request to a PowerDynamo application is received on an individual thread (worker threads). Because of this, PowerDynamo requests are evenly spread among the available processors.

Figure 10-3: Distributing PowerDynamo requests to worker threads

Load balancing across servers

Another setup for improving the performance of a Web site by load balancing is using PowerDynamo with multiple Web servers. Using PowerDynamo with a load balancing mechanism such as the Cisco LocalDirector enables TCP/IP traffic to be distributed across multiple low-cost servers.

You can find additional information on the Cisco LocalDirector http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/cxsr/400/index.shtml .