Re: List of sites using haproxy ?

From: Willy Tarreau <w#1wt.eu>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:14:00 +0200


Hi Alexandre,

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 01:39:47PM +0400, Alexandre Snarskii wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Sorry that I'm starting my subscription with such a silly question,
> but is there any kind of list of projects/sites using haproxy as
> load balancer ? (offline responses are welcome too)
>
> Why I need it - one of our web-services performs much better using
> haproxy maxconn/queue feature (it protects database from spikes),
> but to implement it on production I need to get approval from management.
> And management says "No, unless it's confirmed that this software is
> really used widely", and, as haproxy operates transparently it use is
> not shown in netcraft web server survey like in case of nginx..

That's something very common. Haproxy was first introduced at many places as a quick fix for a non-responding service, and finally adopted once the the service responded again and people understood the use of such a component. This common experience was even described here :

  http://www.ghostwheel.com/merlin/Personal/notes/2007/03/25/200-terabytes-served-in-81-days-247tb-per-day/

There are a lot of sites currently running it, but most of them will never tell it. A few sites transparently report using it [1] : stackoverflow, whos.amung.us, reddit, ravelry, imgur, twitter, fedora, ubuntu, transfer.ro.

But in fact there are a lot of other ones I'm aware of that don't advertise it. Some companies in the finance domain have deployed thousands of instances. Several photos and videos sites use it at data rates around the gigabit. A big file sharing site uses it at 10 Gbps 24*7. A few sites report processing more than one billion requests a day through it (some being large known ads sites BTW). At least one site litteraly reports hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections!

And obviously there are all the ones we don't know about. Sometimes I see an URL of a stats page in the referrer of haproxy's site logs, indicating some use, but obviously I won't report them !

As a hint, you can also look at the domain some of the list members are posting from ;-)

Cheers,
Willy

[1] a few URLs indicating what some sites are using :

whos.amung.us: http://whos.amung.us/acknowledgements/
stackoverflow: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/stack-overflow-network-configuration/
reddit: http://code.reddit.com/browser/srv/haproxy/haproxy.conf
imgur: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi?sort=hot
twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/netik/billions-of-hits-scaling-twitter
fedora: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/haproxy/proxy1/
ravelry: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2008/03/10/load-balancing/
olark: http://blog.olark.com/?page=4 Received on 2010/07/30 15:14

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