load balancing question

[Richard Sharpe]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, René Nieuwenhuizen wrote:

> Richard Sharpe wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>Javid Abdul-AJAVID1 wrote:
> >>    
> >>
> >>>MSDFS is filey system right, how will it help to load balance samba
> >>>connections
> >>>what criteria does it rely to load balance ( like memory, or no of
> >>>connetions etc.. )
> >>>      
> >>>
> >>MSDFS does not really load balance.  MSDFS distributes the 
> >>subdirectories of a directory between multiple servers transparently to 
> >>the clients.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Well, my suggestion was that MSDFS be modified to return referrals to 
> >different machines that each provide access to the same distributed file 
> >system, and that these referals be rotated in a round robin fashion. At 
> >least, that is what we will be doing.
> > 
> >
> Wouldn't it be easy to run a script on the msdfs-root that monitors the 
> load on different machines and that recreates the referrals based on 
> this load.

Sure, but it seems better to defer the re-ordering of the referrals until 
someone asks :-) That's what we plan to do, and then try to do policy 
based stuff, like if this machine has more capacity currently, hand out it 
at the top of the list, and order them by power as well, like P4s before 
PIIIs etc.

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, rsharpe at samba.org, 
sharpe at ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com