Converting existing C++ web service to a load balanced server?

Question

We have a C++ (SOAP-based) web service deployed Using Systinet C++ Server, that has a single port for all the incoming connections from Java front-end.

However recently in production environment when it was tested with around 150 connections, the service went down and hence I wonder how to achieve load-balancing in a C++ SOAP-based web service?

Answer 1

The service is accessed as SOAP/HTTP?

Then you create several instances of you services and put some kind of router between your clients and the web service to distribute the requests across the instances. Often people use dedicated hardware routers for that purpose.

Note that this is often not truly load "balancing", in that the router can be pretty dumb, for example just using a simple round-robin alrgorithm. Such simple appraoches can be pretty effective.

I hope that your services are stateless, that simplifies things. If indiviual clients must maintain affinity to a particualr instance thing get a little tricker.