Thanks for humoring my agressive first post, but I'm stumped...

I am looking for software/technology that allows hosting companies (or webmasters) to essentially put some or all their servers into a single resource pool that allows web-sites one any of the servers to distribute their load to the other servers in the pool as needed during "flash crowds"-- ie: breaking news story or demand for a 'popular' picture

The servers in the pool do not have to be on the same subnet or LAN. They can be in the same rack, across the room, or on the other side of the world.

I am looking for aomething where content does not have to be prepared in any specific way (plug n' play software). not expecting a solution that deals w/back-end/ database stuff-- just static content that has odd usage spikes.

Any responses would help greatly. thx
:D

What you are describing seems to be clustering and load-balancing. Depending on what kind of load(web, database, dns) you want to balance, you might want to look at servers with those features. (Probably commerical product, I haven't heard of an open-source web server that does load-balancing)

I think windows advanced server has two-way clustering, not sure if that's what you need.

Peter

thanks for responding. I reread my post and realize that i didn't explain what i needed properly.

let me try and clarify:-

I have multiple web-sites on multiple servers that I
don't want to have to replicate across another set of servers for load balancing because I dont maintain the sites.
I also dont know which ones will get loads of traffic
that will slow down the other sites on the server.

Perhaps the content could replicated automatically
onto the other servers when any one or more sites gets
too much traffic?

All sites will not get swamped simultaneously so I
should be able to spread the load across the
"non-swamped" servers.

Does this make sense/exist?

:cartman:

Originally posted by ckpeter
I haven't heard of an open-source web server that does load-balancing)


There are several ways actually. Apache using mod_rewrite can be made to do that at application level. Linux Virtual Server (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org) also can do that at networking level. And there are also lots of free TCP load balancer out there.

far as I know I've never seen an on the fly type of loadbalancing like you are describing...

basically you're gonna have to always have the content replicated on all the servers all the time.