Load Balancing of RavenDB

Question

Good Morning,

I am using RavenDB installed as Windows Service on 2 different servers.

Fail-over behavior is set to: FailoverBehavior.AllowReadsFromSecondariesAndWritesToSecondaries and replication ( master => master ) between those servers is enabled as well.

It's all working well in terms of replication.

I would like to Load-balance RavenDB now, as I am not sure if connections are using both servers to deal with requests when both servers are up and running.

Is there any difference in terms of Load Balancing due to way of hosting RavenDB ( Windows Service, IIS )

I was also considering setting up a Load Balancer on top of the RavenDB boxes, that would let request to be handled by different boxes and rely on replication so the data is consistent in both servers.

I not sure if that's right way of dealing with RavenDB though.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Load Balancing can be set by setting the FailoverBehavior to:

FailoverBehavior = FailoverBehavior.AllowReadsFromSecondariesAndWritesToSecondaries
  | FailoverBehavior.ReadFromAllServers;

See: http://ravendb.net/docs/article-page/3.5/Csharp/client-api/bundles/how-client-integrates-with-replication-bundle

This has the effect of making the RavenDB client round robin between the two servers.

In RavenDB 3.5, you can even specify required SLAs, so you can always use the faster server.