[AusNOG] Experiences with web load balancers

[David Hughes]

On 22/02/2010, at 6:38 PM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> Performance gains by SSL offloading were never really a factor. If I hosted
> sites so popular that I couldn't get enough processor cycles for
> cryptography, well, I'd already have a load balancer :)


Ah but when you already have a large loadbalanced server farm for a particular application platform that requires bulk SSL as well, then turning on crypto-offload on the load balancer is a god send.  We have used it to great effect.  And if you are like Roland and wish to maintain the end-to-end crypto semantics then you can use the SSL device to drop the crypto strength on the way through (128 to 48 bit for example).  Certainly helps keep the load off the backend server fleet.

Horses for courses as they say.


David
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