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Organic Web Farm
The World's Greatest Unsticky Organic Web Farm
By Glen Kendell
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
Act One: The Pledge
Dear Reader, consider yourself warned! The following paragraphs are not for the faint-hearted. Contained herein lies a feat of daring so bold, so extraordinary, so shocking that it mocks your very understanding of the universe. Best you turn away now, lest the fabric of your reality unravel as so many loose threads; leaving you standing bare and raving mad, forsaken in a wasteland of shattered beliefs.
I'm going to take a run-of-the-mill session-based web application and turn it into a load balanced web farm before your very eyes - all without making a single coding change to the application. That's right ladies and gentlemen, what you're about to witness is a load balancing technique so ingenious, so perfect that the web server - nay the very web application itself will not even know it is part of a web farm.
Each and every web server in the farm will think it alone is communicating with the client. Each and every web server will record a hit not from the load balancer, but from the client itself. And finally each and every web server will respond directly back to the client, utterly bypassing the very load balancer that brokered the request to begin with.
No special software will be installed on the web servers. No ISAPI filters. No plug-ins or other such nonsense will be required.
Understand! This is hardware load balancing I speak of, pure and simple. Hardware load balancing accomplished without the likes of Zeus, Coyote Point or even the F5 BigIP. This is organic web farming; hardware load balancing achieved with nothing more than two ordinary servers. And perhaps, a little bit of magic.
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