Rock Load Balancer is an intelligent and content-aware load balancer for TCP-based applications like the HTTP and HTTPS web servers. It provides exceptional performance and scalability on demanding applications. It supports fault-tolerant configuration and web interface administration. Heighted features and advantages:

Performance, Scalability and Reliability

• One-thread-per-CPU architecture provides almost linear scalability on SMP systems
• Exceptional out-of-the-box performance and dynamic performance tuning on the fly
• Real-time performance statistics, extensive program counter statistics
• The number of concurrent connections is bounded by operating system resources only

Key Features

• Pure software implementation avoids expensive hardware and operating system dependency
• Supports multiple TCP-based protocols, HTTP, HTTPS, POP3, SNMP, FTP, DNS, ...
• Back-end server health monitoring and fast detection of server failure and recovery
• Back-end server partitioning with rule configurations on request URL and HTTP header
• Minimizes response time with dispatching algorithms round robin and least connection, ...
• Supports HTTP/HTTPS session persistence and session affinity for e-commerce applications
• Supports HTTPS session ID persistence for improved SSL performance
• Supports SSL proxy with balancer handling SSL traffic on behalf of back-end servers
• Supports SSL protocols SSlv2, SSLv3 and TLS, supports SSL client authentication
• Supports hardware crypto accelerators plug-in for improved SSL performance
• Keep-alive connections between balancer and back-end servers for improved performance
• Works with all web servers and optimized for Rock Web Server
• Built-in denial of services protection and self-recovery

Failover and Availability

• Auto-restart fault management in cases of software and hardware failures
• Fault-tolerant configuration offers further protection with failover
• Replicates configuration information changes between the primary and standby automatically
• Replicates session data between the primary and standby load balancers automatically

Administration

• Web interface and command line interface load balancer administrations
• Secure web interface administration from anywhere on the Internet
• Dynamic addition and removal of back-end servers without affecting existing requests
• Dynamic addition and removal of rule configurations without affecting exiting requests
• Administrator email notification on configurable event triggers
• Rotational transaction log and customized log format