Be sure to cover all your bases if you are going to use a HW only solution.

Consider the following...

It has been my experience that most hardware devices do not have any insight into the ColdFusion Server. Furthermore, their ability to montior "health" is usually focused on CPU and/or memory/disk utiliztion which provides only part of the picture to calculate the server load.

As an example... your application makes database queries, and you have the timeout set to 30 seconds. Now suppose the queries are taking just slightly less time than your timeout setting (say 27 seconds. ColdFusion will now set up x threads (depending on what you set in the CF administrator) each running a query. CF is now waiting for the queries to complete, and queueing up any new requests.

The hardware load balancer will see this box as under no load at all (cpu, disk and network utilization will be very low); therefore, it will continue to send requests to this box. ColdFusion will continue to queue up new requests until the box fails or becomes unresponsive (remember since the queries ARE coming back, the restart server feature of the CF admin will not "kick in").

ClusterCats on the other hand monitors queued requests, among other things, and will see this as a server under load.

Obviously, there are ways other than ClusterCats to deal with an issue like this. My point is that when using a HW only load balancer solution, you need to be aware of the particular limitations of your HW device.

Rusty

-----Original Message----- From: Ron Anderson [SMTP:randerson@whoscalling.com] Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 9:09 AM To: CF-Server Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

No, it was because there was no significant need to run the software if we're using F5 for load balancing. I couldn't think of anything we needed ClusterCats for, so we purchased CF Professional and saved the money for other things...like buying more servers.

-----Original Message----- From: Bryan Lee [mailto:BLee@Bigdough.com] Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 8:33 AM To: CF-Server Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

Was it because you ran into the same problem as I described?

-----Original Message----- From: Ron Anderson [mailto:randerson@whoscalling.com] Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 12:02 AM To: CF-Server Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

We've decided not to use ClusterCats in favor of using the F5 alone. We monitor our services on a separate server using IPSentry.

-----Original Message----- From: Bryan Lee [mailto:BLee@Bigdough.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 11:29 AM To: CF-Server Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

Since it was already packaged with enterprise, we wanted to use it to notify us via email when CFServer service failed or if a thread was held open, etc. BIGIP can be configured to alert based on events written to the log, but I figured ClusterCats could monitor the CF Services and threads better.

Is there anyone out there running CC behind a HLB? or is everyone running only CC or only HLB?

-----Original Message----- From: Brook Davies [mailto:brook@maracasmedia.com] Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 1:07 PM To: CF-Server Subject: Re: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

Why do you need clustercats with the F5 BigIP?

At 12:47 PM 02/01/01 -0500, you wrote: >Does anyone have experience running ClusterCats in passive mode behind the >BigIP LB? > >I've followed the Allaire tech article (15972) for using clustercats in >conjunction >with a non Cisco LocalDirector LB...but am getting some poor performance >results. When clustercats is turned off, the pages are served up very >quickly. However as soon as the clustercats services are turned on, the >pages are served up very slowly. Are there any additional settings I am >missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated. > > > > > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, send a message to cf-server-request@houseoffusion.com with 'unsubscribe' in the body or visit the list page at www.houseoffusion.com