HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for web sites crawling under very high loads while needing persistence or Layer7 processing
Performance Parameters of Haproxy:
maxconn <number>
Sets the maximum per-process number of concurrent connections to <number>. It
is equivalent to the command-line argument "-n". Proxies will stop accepting
connections when this limit is reached. The "ulimit-n" parameter is
automatically adjusted according to this value. See also "ulimit-n".
maxpipes <number>
Sets the maximum per-process number of pipes to <number>. Currently, pipes
are only used by kernel-based tcp splicing. Since a pipe contains two file
descriptors, the "ulimit-n" value will be increased accordingly. The default
value is maxconn/4, which seems to be more than enough for most heavy usages.
The splice code dynamically allocates and releases pipes, and can fall back
to standard copy, so setting this value too low may only impact performance.
noepoll
Disables the use of the "epoll" event polling system on Linux. It is
equivalent to the command-line argument "-de". The next polling system
used will generally be "poll". See also "nosepoll", and "nopoll".
nokqueue
Disables the use of the "kqueue" event polling system on BSD. It is
equivalent to the command-line argument "-dk". The next polling system
used will generally be "poll". See also "nopoll".
nopoll
Disables the use of the "poll" event polling system. It is equivalent to the
command-line argument "-dp". The next polling system used will be "select".
It should never be needed to disable "poll" since it’s available on all
platforms supported by HAProxy. See also "nosepoll", and "nopoll" and
"nokqueue".
nosepoll
Disables the use of the "speculative epoll" event polling system on Linux. It
is equivalent to the command-line argument "-ds". The next polling system
used will generally be "epoll". See also "nosepoll", and "nopoll".
nosplice
Disables the use of kernel tcp splicing between sockets on Linux. It is
equivalent to the command line argument "-dS". Data will then be copied
using conventional and more portable recv/send calls. Kernel tcp splicing is
limited to some very recent instances of kernel 2.6. Most verstions between
2.6.25 and 2.6.28 are buggy and will forward corrupted data, so they must not
be used. This option makes it easier to globally disable kernel splicing in
case of doubt. See also "option splice-auto", "option splice-request" and
"option splice-response".
spread-checks <0..50, in percent>
Sometimes it is desirable to avoid sending health checks to servers at exact
intervals, for instance when many logical servers are located on the same
physical server. With the help of this parameter, it becomes possible to add
some randomness in the check interval between 0 and +/- 50%. A value between
2 and 5 seems to show good results. The default value remains at 0.
tune.maxaccept <number>
Sets the maximum number of consecutive accepts that a process may perform on
a single wake up. High values give higher priority to high connection rates,
while lower values give higher priority to already established connections.
This value is limited to 100 by default in single process mode. However, in
multi-process mode (nbproc > 1), it defaults to 8 so that when one process
wakes up, it does not take all incoming connections for itself and leaves a
part of them to other processes. Setting this value to -1 completely disables
the limitation. It should normally not be needed to tweak this value.
tune.maxpollevents <number>
Sets the maximum amount of events that can be processed at once in a call to
the polling system. The default value is adapted to the operating system. It
has been noticed that reducing it below 200 tends to slightly decrease
latency at the expense of network bandwidth, and increasing it above 200
tends to trade latency for slightly increased bandwidth.
