Tomcat Load Balancing via AJP Module

I've been playing with Tomcat in my spare time and have had some fun with the load balancing module, which happens to be implemented with the help of our friend Apache HTTPD. The basic premise is that we point our traffic at an HTTPD instance and he disperses the traffic to a set of worker nodes. This can be done via the standard http protocol or the Tomcat ajp protocol.

I like this config for /etc/httpd/conf.d/proxy_ajp.conf:

<Proxy balancer://cluster-http>
ProxySet lbmethod=bytraffic nofailover=on
ProxySet stickysession=JSESSIONID timeout=15
BalancerMember http://tomcat1:8080 \
    retry=120 loadfactor=1
BalancerMember http://tomcat2:8080 \
    retry=120 loadfactor=1
BalancerMember http://tomcat3:8080 \
    retry=120 loadfactor=1 lbset=1
</Proxy>
ProxyPass /sample balancer://cluster-http/sample

In the ProxySet lines we define basic values, the only one of which is interesting is timeout. This determines how long a device has to respond before it considered "down". Next we list the nodes, in this case three.

Oddly, the timeout can be specified cluster-wide, but the retry, which specifies how often we check to see if "down" nodes are up, is listed individually. (It is possible to list timeout individually.) The loadfactor determines the weighting for each node.

The fun value is lbset. This one effectively allows the specification of a hotspare. In the above example, all "0" get hit all the time, and "1" gets no traffic. If all "0" nodes go down, "1" gets traffic.

Ready for sexy? Add this:

<Location /balancer-manager>
SetHandler balancer-manager
</Location>
ProxyPass /balancer-manager/ !

Now you have an interactive, web based, management screen: