Simon Willison’s Weblog

mod_rpaf for Apache. A more secure alternative to Django’s equivalent middleware: sets the REMOTE_ADDR of incoming requests from whitelisted load balancers to the X-Forwarded-For header, without any risk that if the load balancers are missing attackers could abuse it to spoof their IP addresses. 24th June 2008, 5:02 pm

Scaling your website with the Perlbal web server (PDF) (via) Perlbal documentation is pretty thin on the ground; this is a really useful introduction from Frank Wiles. 17th June 2008, 10:39 pm

Load Balancer Update. WordPress.com has switched from Pound to nginx for load balancing, resulting in a significant drop in CPU usage. I’ve been using nginx on my little VPS for over a year now with no complaints, nice to know it scales up as well as down. 1st May 2008, 10:06 am

A Fair Proxy Balancer for Nginx and Mongrel. nginx uses round robin for proxying by default; this extension module ensures requests are queued up and sent through to backend mongrel servers that aren’t currently busy. I don’t see any reason this wouldn’t work with servers other than mongrel. 9th December 2007, 2:57 pm

Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications (via) I recall that early versions of Netscape picked a random server from a hard-coded list each time a user clicked the “What’s New” button, back before server-side scaling techniques were well understood. 5th October 2007, 11:29 pm