HAProxy vs NGINX

Table of Content

  • what is HAProxy?
    • what is load balancing?
    • what is high availability?
    • when to use?
  • what is NGINX?
    • what is webserver?
    • NGINx vs NGINX Plus
  • comparison between HAProxy and NGINX
  • which one to choose?

What is HAProxy?

HAProxy stands for High Availability Proxy, is a popular open source software.

  • Proxying for TCP and HTTP-based application 
  • Load balancing
  • High availability

Improve performance and reliability of a server by distributing workload across multiple server

What is Load Balancing?

  • efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across multiple server

What is High Availability?

  • High availability is a quality of a system that assures a high level of operational performance for a given period of time.

What is High Availability?

When to use?

  • Websites with very high loads
  • Multiple connection to website
  • Load Balancing required at HTTP and TCP level
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Maximize Availability
  • Maximize throughput
  • Horizontal Scaling

What is Nginx?

NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more.

What is Web Server?

Why choose NGINX?

High Concurrency

Low memory used

NGINX as load balancer

simple configuration

 

simple control and monitoring

 

not suited for complex or large system

 

no status on connection rate

NGINX vs NGINX Plus

NGINX Plus includes exclusive features not available in NGINX Open Source and award-winning support.

 

Exclusive features includes active health checks, session persistence, JWT authentication, and more.

NGINX vs NGINX Plus

NGINX vs NGINX Plus

NGINX Plus Pricing

Comparison between HAProxy and NGINX

HaProxy NGINX
Full web server
 
Concurrency
 
Load balancer
 
SSL offloading
 
Able to run in windows
Metrics 61 different metrics 7 different metrics

Proxying traffic

#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# Global settings
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
global
    log         127.0.0.1 local2     #Log configuration
 
    chroot      /var/lib/haproxy
    pidfile     /var/run/haproxy.pid
    maxconn     4000                
    user        haproxy             #Haproxy running under user and group "haproxy"
    group       haproxy
    daemon
 
    # turn on stats unix socket
    stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats
 
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will
# use if not designated in their block
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
defaults
    mode                    http
    log                     global
    option                  httplog
    option                  dontlognull
    option http-server-close
    option forwardfor       except 127.0.0.0/8
    option                  redispatch
    retries                 3
    timeout http-request    10s
    timeout queue           1m
    timeout connect         10s
    timeout client          1m
    timeout server          1m
    timeout http-keep-alive 10s
    timeout check           10s
    maxconn                 3000
 
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
#HAProxy Monitoring Config
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
listen haproxy3-monitoring *:8080                #Haproxy Monitoring run on port 8080
    mode http
    option forwardfor
    option httpclose
    stats enable
    stats show-legends
    stats refresh 5s
    stats uri /stats                             #URL for HAProxy monitoring
    stats realm Haproxy\ Statistics
    stats auth howtoforge:howtoforge            #User and Password for login to the monitoring dashboard
    stats admin if TRUE
    default_backend app-main                    #This is optionally for monitoring backend
 
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# FrontEnd Configuration
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
frontend main
    bind *:80
    option http-server-close
    option forwardfor
    default_backend app-main
 
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# BackEnd roundrobin as balance algorithm
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
backend app-main
    balance roundrobin                                     #Balance algorithm
    option httpchk HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ localhost    #Check the server application is up and healty - 200 status code
    server server1 172.20.32.109:80 check 
    server server2 172.20.32.110:80 check

http {
    server {
        listen 80;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://backend;
        }
    }

    upstream backend {
        server 172.20.32.109:80;
        server 172.20.32.110:80;
    }
}

NGINX

HAProxy

Monitoring

HAProxy stats page

NGINX status page

http://178.62.227.66:8080/stats

username: howtoforge

Interpretation

Which one to choose?

THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG

  • load balancer that provide more information
  • simpler & easy to setup
  • serving static file
  • running dynamic apps

Depends on

what you want..

  • You may also used both HAProxy and NGINX

Reference

  • https://www.freelancinggig.com/blog/2017/04/26/haproxy-vs-nginx-software-load-balancer-better/
  • https://www.keycdn.com/support/haproxy-vs-nginx
  • https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-nginx-plus-web-server/
  • https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-servers-work/
  • http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/09/25/nginx-plus-vs-open-source-nginx/
  • https://www.nginx.com/blog/load-balancing-with-nginx-plus/
  • https://www.keycdn.com/support/nginx-status
  • https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx/#compare-versions
  • https://www.nginx.com/resources/faq/

APPENDIX

  • Active connections – Number of all open connections. This doesn’t mean number of users. A single user, for a single pageview can open many concurrent connections to your server.

  • Server accepts handled requests – This shows three values.

    • First is total accepted connections.

    • Second is total handled connections. Usually first 2 values are same.

    • Third value is number of and handles requests. This is usually greater than second value.

    • Dividing third-value by second-one will give you number of requests per connection handled by Nginx. In above example, 10993/7368, 1.49 requests per connections.

  • Reading – nginx reads request header

  • Writing – nginx reads request body, processes request, or writes response to a client

  • Waiting – keep-alive connections, actually it is active – (reading + writing).This value depends on keepalive-timeout. Do not confuse non-zero waiting value for poor performance. It can be ignored. Although, you can force zero waiting by setting keepalive_timeout 0;

HAProxy Features

  • Layer 4 (TCP) and Layer 7 (HTTP) load balancing

  • URL rewriting

  • Rate limiting

  • SSL/TLS termination

  • Gzip compression

  • Proxy Protocol support

  • Health checking

  • Connection and HTTP message logging

  • HTTP/2

  • Multithreading
  • Hitless Reloads
  • gRPC Support
  • Lua and SPOE Support
  • API Support
  • Layer 4 Retries
  • Simplified circuit breaking
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