Insufficient channel capacity of 1GBit

Posted by Roman S on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Roman S
Published on 2011-11-19T07:10:57Z Indexed on 2011/11/19 9:55 UTC
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There is a Caching Server (Varnish): it receives data from Amazon S3 on request, saves it for some time and gives it to the client. We have encountered the problem of insufficient channel capacity of 1GBit. Peak load within 4 hours completely chokes the channel. Server performance is sufficient for now. Approximately 4.5TB of data are transmitted per day. More than 100TB are accumulated per month.

The first thought that comes to mind is simply to add one more 1GBit port and sleep peacefully until 2GBit are not enough (it may happen quite quickly) or one server is not able to handle it.

And then we just need to add new Caching Servers. But now we need a Load Balancer, which will send requests on one and the same URL, always on one and the same server (to avoid multiple copies of the same cached objects).

Here are the questions:

  1. Does a Balancer need a band equal to sum of all bands of Caching Servers? What shall we do in case there are no ports in a Balancer? Should we add more Balancers or solve the problem by means of Round robin DNS?
  2. What are the standard approaches to such problems?
  3. Can anyone advise hosting-companies, which can solve this problem? We are interested in American and European markets.

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