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Prerequisites

- not applicable

Introduction

Loadbalancing Futurama Website or Futurama Webservice applications

Description

Depending on the expected number of users of your Futurama Website or Futurama Webservice application it can be necessary to loadbalance the service requests. At this page more information is given regarding loadbalancing Futurama applications.

Within Futurama an internal loadbalancer is available for Futurama Website and Webservice. The following chapters describe using these. If these methods are not within your possibilities, we still offer a legacy method of loadbalancing your applications, shown further below.

Webservice internal load balancing (Futurama 18.02+)

Futurama Webservice can provide simplified loadbalancing without changing IIS settings, which means it is capable of handling concurrent calls by various users in parallel. This will increase memory and processor usage, but will improve request-throughput and latency in high-load situations.

All that is required for the new load balancing functionality is setting a the numProcessors field in the configuration as shown here, and all webservice requests will be handled in parallel by the desired number of processors.

Website internal load balancing (Futurama 18.08+)

Futurama Web can also provide simplified loadbalancing without changing IIS settings, which means it is capable of handling concurrent calls by various users in parallel. This will increase memory and processor usage, but will improve request-throughput and latency in high-load situations.

All that is required for the new load balancing functionality is setting a the numProcessors field in the configuration as shown here, and all webrequests will be handled in parallel by the desired number of processors. See this page for detailed information about using the Futurama loadbalancer for your webapplication.

Configuring IIS to facilitate Load balancing for Futurama (Legacy)

CPU use Futurama applications

In IIS it is possible to configure that server requests for an application are handled by multiple CPU’s. However, in the Futurama context this is not possible. During a Futurama session all the requests within that session must be handled by the same CPU. So without loadbalancing it is not possible to use multiple CPU’s to scale the requests. More specific: every Futurama installation must be using the same CPU. 

Behaviour Futurama requests

Requests to a Futurama application are synchronous. That means that a new request is handled at the moment that the previous request is finished. Suppose you have two Futurama applications. Application 1 is a Futurama Website application and application 2 is a Futurama Webservice application. The Futurama Website applications does at some pages requests to the Futurama Webservice application in order to retrieve data to be used in the Futurama Website application. In this situation it is important to loadbalance both the Futurama Website application and the Futurama Webservice application. To clarify this suppose that only the Futurama Webservice is loadbalanced. Due that requests to Futurama are synchronous an incoming request to Futurama Website will be handled as soon as the previous is finished. So after a request to application 1 is received a free CPU will be used to deal with the request from application 1 to application 2. The next request to application 1 will be handled not earlier then the moment request from application 1 to application 2 is finished. So loadbalancing only application 2 does not make sense when application 1 is not also loadbalanced.

Application Request Routing

Application Request Routing (ARR) is a feature in the IIS (Internet Information Services) Manager that can be used for load balancing of server requests and increase scalability of web applications. ARR can also be applied on web applications made with Futurama. See the support page Application Request Routing for detailed information how to use ARR to loadbalance for example a Futurama web application.

Related Topics

- Getting the most out of Futurama Web using the loadbalancer: Detailed information of the Futurama loadbalancer for web applications

- Application Request Routing: The IIS module that can be used to load balance server requests

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Updated: 2018-09-26