Author - Ramya

Nginx as a load balancer for Magento

Introduction

During seasonal peaks or as traffic grows, there will be a need to add multiple app servers to your Magento store. A load balancer for Magento becomes essential. We have found that using nginx as a load balancer gives acceptable performance. We have not found many instances where we would recommend a hardware load balancer. Recent tests by nginx confirms this. We would recommend a different load balancer only for additional features such as autoscaling. Nginx as a load balancer offers many advantages including
  • uneven upsream servers as nginx can assign weights to each load balancer
  • self healing - takes a upstream server out of a cluster if it stops responding
  • path based load balancing
  • combination of path based and weight based load balancing
  • php upstream servers
  • SSL/TLS termination
This article assumes the process of adding a new app server to a Magento cluster is well understood. Here the focus is on the nginx configuration.

Load Balancer for Magento : Basic architecture

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