Performance Enhancements - Intergraph WebScale User Manual

WebScale™ User's Guide
Also new with version 2.1, WebScale now automatically generates the cluster MAC
address based on the cluster's primary IP address. This simplifies installation and lets
you put multiple WebScale clusters on the same subnet without manually changing the
MAC address. When configuring your router, you can use the new webscale
ip2mac command to conveniently list the MAC address used for a given cluster IP
address.
Remote Cluster Control
WebScale's cluster control program (webscale.exe) has been enhanced to let you start,
stop, and query the cluster from any networked Windows NT system. You can control
all cluster hosts with one command, or you can control them individually. The control
program has full password protection to prevent unauthorized access. When executed
on the cluster hosts, the control program operates in the same manner as it did in
previous versions.
Starting with version 2.1, you can now instruct WebScale to complete all outstanding
connections prior removing a host from the cluster or disabling traffic handling for port
rules using the webscale drainstop and webscale drain <port> commands.
This avoids disrupting service to clients when these cluster set changes need to be made.
Enhanced Session Support
Support for client sessions has been enhanced in version 2. If a server application (such
as a web server) maintains state information about a client session that spans multiple
TCP connections, it is important that all TCP connections for this client be directed to
the same cluster host. In previous versions of WebScale, you could optionally force this
behavior by setting the WebScale registry parameter ScaleSingleClient to 0. Otherwise,
WebScale would load balance TCP connections from a single client across the cluster to
maximize performance. Starting with version 2, you can invoke support for client
sessions, called client affinity, individually for each port range.
In addition, version 2 lets you optionally modify WebScale's session support to direct
all client requests from a TCP/IP Class C address range to a single cluster host. This
feature ensures that clients which use multiple proxy servers to access the cluster will
have their TCP connections directed to the same cluster host. The use of multiple proxy
servers at the client's site causes requests from a single client to appear to originate
from different systems. Assuming that all of the client's proxy servers are located
within the same 256 host Class C address range, you can now ensure that client sessions
are properly handled with minimum impact on load distribution among the cluster hosts.

Performance Enhancements

Version 2 incorporates numerous internal performance enhancements to further
streamline WebScale's actions and ensure that WebScale takes full advantage of the
2