I have an Amazon OpsWorks stack running HAProxy (balance = source) and several node.js instances running socket.io. It seems HAProxy determines the max session limit for a given instance based on the memory limits of that instance, which is fine, but my application can often expect clients to be utilising two pages, both connected to a socket, for upwards of 4 hours.
With the max session limit at 40 or 180, I'd only be able to have 20/60 concurrent clients until one disconnects. So with that said, if the limit is reached, other clients will be placed in a queue until a slot becomes free which given the nature of the site is likely to not be for some while. That means I only have a working site for a serious minority.
What's the best way of getting around this? I read several posts where they'll have a backend of 4,000 – 30,000 and a max session limit of just 30 per each server, but how do they achieve this? Is there a setting in HAProxy, or is it more likely they continuously reconnect/disconnect the client either through their actual application?
Edit
To shed some more light on the application – it itself is a PHP application that makes use of sockets for real-time events. These sockets are done so through socket.io
with that server being generated using express
. This server.js
file communicates with an Amazon ElastiCache Redis server (which to my understanding socket.io 1.0 handles all of this backend).
On the client side of things, user's connect to the socket server and emit a connect event so that to join a room unique to them. A user will then load a second page and again emit a connect event and join that same unique room. This then allows for them to emit and receive various events over the course of their session – again, this session can last upwards of 4 hours.
HAProxy routes the user to the same server based upon their IP hash (balance source
) – the rest of the options are kept to the OpsWorks default – see the config file below.
I guess what I need to know is if Cur
sessions hits 40, and these connections are long-lived (i.e. they don't get readily disconnected), what will happen to those in the queue? It's no good if they are left waiting 4 hours obviously.
—
HAProxy.cfg
global
log 127.0.0.1 local0
log 127.0.0.1 local1 notice
#log loghost local0 info
maxconn 80000
#debug
#quiet
user haproxy
group haproxy
stats socket /tmp/haproxy.sock
defaults
log global
mode http
option httplog
option dontlognull
retries 3
option redispatch
maxconn 80000
timeout client 60s # Client and server timeout must match the longest
timeout server 60s # time we may wait for a response from the server.
timeout queue 120s # Don't queue requests too long if saturated.
timeout connect 10s # There's no reason to change this one.
timeout http-request 30s # A complete request may never take that long.
option httpclose # disable keepalive (HAProxy does not yet support the HTTP keep-alive mode)
option abortonclose # enable early dropping of aborted requests from pending queue
option httpchk # enable HTTP protocol to check on servers health
stats auth strexm:OYk8834nkPOOaKstq48b
stats uri /haproxy?stats
# Set up application listeners here.
listen application 0.0.0.0:80
# configure a fake backend as long as there are no real ones
# this way HAProxy will not fail on a config check
balance source
server localhost 127.0.0.1:8080 weight 1 maxconn 5 check
Server.js
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var server = require('http').Server(app);
var io = require('socket.io')(server);
var redis = require('socket.io-redis');
io.adapter(redis({ host: ###, port: 6379 }));
server.listen(80); // opsworks node.js server requires port 80
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.sendfile('./index.html');
});
io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {
socket.on('join', function(room) {
socket.join(room);
});
socket.on('alert', function (room) {
socket.in(room).emit('alert_dashboard');
});
socket.on('event', function(data) {
socket.in(data.room).emit('event_dashboard', data);
});
});
Client
var socket = io.connect('http://haproxy_server_ip:80');
socket.on('connect', function() {
socket.emit('join', room id #);
});
Best Answer
I don't think haproxy sets these limits. I have a suspicion that there may be limit on how many session from same the ip address are allowed, so if you are testing it from a single machine then that would likely be your problem. Haproxy indeed can easily handle 10th of thouthands connections.