When your project becomes highly demanded and visited, you face a problem – necessity to increase your hardware productivity, as it should be able to handle and rapidly serve all the incoming users’ requests. Adding more resources will temporarily improve the situation, saving your server from the failure, but won’t solve the root issue. And this results in the need to set up a clustering solution with an embedded automatic load balancing.
Application cluster adjusting is quite easy with CirrusGrid – just add a few more application server instances to your environment via the topology wizard. In addition, you’ll automatically get the NGINX-balancer server enabled in front of your project. It will be responsible for the even load distribution among the stated number of app server nodes, performed by virtue of the load balancing.

In such a way, your application performance grows significantly, increasing the number of requests that can be served at one time. As a nice bonus, you decrease the risks of app inaccessibility, since if one server fails, all the rest continue working.
In order to prove this scheme is that efficient, we’ll show you how to perform the load balancing testing with the help of ApacheBench (ab) tool. It provides a number of possibilities for testing the servers’ ability to cope with the increasing and changeable load. Though ab was designed for Apache installations testing, it can be used to benchmark any HTTP server.
So, let’s get started and test it in real time.