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Simple load balancer for Xojo Web app

Recently we implemented some web applications for a client. We use cgi deployment with a linux server running apache, so the apache can handle the SSL stuff. If you have 20 people on one instance, it may get a bit slow for each user. To improve performance, we installed the application several times on the web server. For this we build the app several times with different app names and different identifiers. So we have MyApp1, MyApp2, MyApp3 and MyApp4. All have an unique identifier like com.company.myapp1 to 4. You can easily build that with a build script automatically.

 

Once you have all 4 copies of the app on the web server, you may need a little load balancing script. But first, each instance must be able to tell how many sessions it has, so we got a status query for the HandleSpecialURL event. The simple version looks like this:

 

EventHandler Function HandleSpecialURL(Request As WebRequest) As Boolean

#Pragma BackgroundTasks False

if Request.Path = "Status" then

Dim j As New JSONItem

Dim a As app = app

j.Value("MemoryUsed") = runtime.MemoryUsed

j.Value("ObjectCount") = runtime.ObjectCount

j.Value("SessionCount") = a.SessionCount

j.Value("Name") = a.ExecutableFile.Name

Request.Print j.ToString

return true

end if

End EventHandler

 

The actual version for the client does much more like being able to do authorization and list the sessions in detail, so the admin can see in a nice tool what webpages are currently being used. Anyway, once you can query session count from outside, you can use that in a script to distribute people. We got this script for you:

 

#!/usr/bin/php

<?php

 

// simply http query and return answer

function get_content($URL)

{

      $ch = curl_init();

      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

      curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);

      $data = curl_exec($ch);

      curl_close($ch);

      return $data;

}

 

// Fallback URL if all are unreachable

$bestURL = "http://webapps.monkeybreadsoftware.de/offline.html";

$bestSessionCount = 9999;

 

for ($x = 1; $x <= 4; $x++) 

{

$StatusURL = "http://webapps.monkeybreadsoftware.de/MyApp".$x."/myapp.cgi";

$JSON = get_content($StatusURL."/api/status");

 

if (strlen($JSON) > 0)

{

$j = json_decode($JSON, true);

if ($j == NULL)

{

// Server answer not JSON!?

}

else

{

$SessionCount = $j["SessionCount"];

if ($SessionCount < $bestSessionCount)

{

$bestURL = $StatusURL;

$bestSessionCount = $SessionCount;

}

}

}

}

 

# redirect to best match

header('Location: '.$bestURL);

?>

 

This could be saved as index.php in a folder, so you can redirect people there without the index.php in the URL. The script has a fallback URL to go to when all applications are offline. This doesn't happen often, but it can happen. The script queries status for all 4 and looks for the URL with the smallest number of sessions. On the end we just redirect to the new location with the application.

 

We ask user to use a start URL like http://webapps.monkeybreadsoftware.de/ and that will trigger index.php and redirect to the final app like http://webapps.monkeybreadsoftware.de/MyApp1/myapp.cgi URL.

 

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We'll include the sample with future plugin examples.

03 03 19 - 19:07