A friend of mine was using LD's on his service. They do about 180mbps over 3 locations and were running performance problems. (They ended up moving to F5's). One of Exodus's Senior Network Engineers has seen that consistenly become problematic at about the magic 80mbps you mentioned. I spoke with a few different neteng buddies when we started looking at LB's over a year ago and they all told me to stay away from the LD's. But like all of us, they get better as they stay around longer... Probably, it's the same with all LB products ... you have to match the right products with your needs. Me, I have to go for the big scale. So I'll sacrifice features for ability to consistently handle the traffic and scalability. I eliminated quite a few simply because they couldn't handle the volume, but that doesn't mean that they would work well for a site located in one of the big data centers. -Karyn -----Original Message----- From: Bennett Todd [mailto:bet@rahul.net] Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 9:25 AM To: Karyn Ulriksen Cc: 'nanog@merit.edu' Subject: Re: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron 2000-07-06-11:56:34 Karyn Ulriksen:

...

How about Local Director?

Everyone I've spoke to about LD is very unhappy with it's performance.

That can only be because you didn't speak to me:-). Seriously, I've used them a fair bit, and like 'em a lot. Their H-A failover is superb, they load balance really gracefully, their hold-time feature (making assignments sticky) works well with simple website designs for session tracking; and I really love the way they passively monitor the performance of all servers in the farm and consistently route traffic to the currently fastest server. I've heard that they max out around 80Mbps. That was a year or so ago, I've no idea if that's still the case. I've never hit their limits. But I can believe that a faster-but-dumber load balancer would have a higher ceiling. -Bennett