Ben wrote:
> This is a very simple question that is confusing me. I'm a bit
> confused about whether load balancing and morroring are similar
> concepts? I am referring to web server load balancing here. As far as
> I understand mirroring is keeping duplicate copies of web pages in
> different geographical locations to reduce number of hops whereas load
> balancing is redirecting traffic to other servers containing copies of
> web pages. So in other words, when load balancing is done, the servers
> have to contain same copies of pages (which makes it identical to
> mirroring). Am i right?
You already answered most of Your own question.
But, load balancing and mirroring have nothing to do with one-another:
In Your example, You can have copies of specific data stored at
different locations (mirrors). You can then present the user with a list
of available mirrors and let them chose one of them. kernel.org does
exactly this. - Strictly speaking, this is not load-balancing, although
it will eventually balance the load.
Load balancing for itself is a different thing and mostly has to do
with routing (no matter what is being routed, whether it's web pages or
a ssh session): If You have more than one route to any given desti-
nation, You might want to parallelize those routes to get a higher
transfer rate. The thing is that in this context, "load balancing" only
goes for _connections_, not for _services_. So if You spread, say,
http-requests over multiple identical (mirrored) web-servers, this is
not considered load balancing, but rather redundancy.
Cheers, Jack.
--
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My personal reading of the string "MicroSoft" expands to "NanoWeak"...
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