While I’ve been doing performance testing of different Ruby on Rails deployment schemes, I came across very interesting software - HAProxy.

HAProxy is a TCP/HTTP reverse proxy which is particularly suited for high
availability environments. Indeed, it can :
- route HTTP requests depending on statically assigned cookies ;
- spread the load among several servers while assuring server persistence
through the use of HTTP cookies ;
- switch to backup servers in the event a main one fails ;
- accept connections to special ports dedicated to service monitoring ;
- stop accepting connections without breaking existing ones ;
- add/modify/delete HTTP headers both ways ;
- block requests matching a particular pattern ;

It needs very little resource. Its event-driven architecture allows it to easily
handle thousands of simultaneous connections on hundreds of instances without
risking the system’s stability.

As for me, I’m really impressed by HAProxy’s performance and I will suggest to try to use it in some high-availability environments because of its performance and set of features. Take a look at this software - it is really good tool!

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