Question : Load balancing Tomcat web servers

I am thinking about buying load balancing switch for my 5 web server because I am running Tomcat and it is really unstable with my JSPs on one web server.  I was thinking about using either Cisco or Radware.  Can some please recommend what I should purchase?  I have looked on the web but there are not very many reviews on load balancers

Answer : Load balancing Tomcat web servers

If you don't want to use the apache jakarta project solution to load balance tomcat servers from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/balancer-howto.html

I cannot praise the cisco content switch 11500 series enough.

we have three jboss/tomcat web servers load balanced behind a CSS they are all using a shared DB on a 4th server. We were able to have the users hit random servers until they generated a session id and then stick them to the same server for the duration of the session.

We did some rediculous load testing with a 14 page test that involved signing in and making database calls and found this solution could support well over 80 users running a complete test every second, our design required 32 and the only reason why our solution didn't go higher was that we ran out of sockets on the windows test boxes... the servers never went over 50% processor usitlization.

I cannot say anything about RadWare, but the CSS did wonders for us.

But do not get it without TAC support, trying to trouble shoot it will be outside of most of your local cisco engineers baliwick because it is such a specialized product.

Once we understood how it does its magic, it has ever since.

Let me know if you have more questions.

-t