This is actually a great idea. The last company I worked for ran into several issues with load balancing servers. Two out of the three major releases I was around for were an unmitigated disasters.
The first was because of old load balancing servers getting bogged down with traffic. CIO got pissed, dropped three million on brand new spanking SSD drives and new "state-of-the-art" servers. Cue to the next release.
Pretty much the same issue. It was two lines in a program that was calling a file from Sharepoint - thousands of times a second to the server and bogged down all three of the load balancer servers with traffic within minutes of the release. Took the back-end developers a week and some help from Microsoft to fix the bug. I just sat back and giggled since the CIO spent two hours in a meeting with the whole IT department lecturing them on the importance of load testing immediately after the first releases failure.
Needless to say, they didn't do any load testing for the applications either time which contributed to the issue. Of course, it just goes to show even with the bestest, newest hardware, you can still bring your site/applications to its knees.
> It was two lines in a program that was calling a file from Sharepoint - thousands of times a second to the server and bogged down all three of the load balancer servers with traffic within minutes of the release.
That type of issue can be quickly identified if you have, on the team, the sort of mind who is inquisitive of what goes on at low levels, and is not afraid of poking around with tcpdump and network interface traffic counters and stuff like that.
The first was because of old load balancing servers getting bogged down with traffic. CIO got pissed, dropped three million on brand new spanking SSD drives and new "state-of-the-art" servers. Cue to the next release.
Pretty much the same issue. It was two lines in a program that was calling a file from Sharepoint - thousands of times a second to the server and bogged down all three of the load balancer servers with traffic within minutes of the release. Took the back-end developers a week and some help from Microsoft to fix the bug. I just sat back and giggled since the CIO spent two hours in a meeting with the whole IT department lecturing them on the importance of load testing immediately after the first releases failure.
Needless to say, they didn't do any load testing for the applications either time which contributed to the issue. Of course, it just goes to show even with the bestest, newest hardware, you can still bring your site/applications to its knees.