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by gleb 4867 days ago
From experience, this is an incredibly effective way to DoS yourself. It was the default behaviour of nginx LB ages ago. Maybe only on EngineYard. Doesn't really matter as nobody uses nginx LB anymore.

Even ignoring the POST requests problem (yup, it tried to replay those) properly cancelling a request on all levels of a multi-level rails stack is very hard/not possible in practice. So you end up DOSing the hard to scale lower levels of the stack (e.g. database) at the expense of the easy to scale LB.
2 comments
nostrademons 4866 days ago
It's a capacity/latency tradeoff. Perhaps I'm biased by working at Google, where capacity is cheap and latency will kill you, but IIUC Heroku runs off of AWS and their database tier needs to scale horizontally anyway, so reserving sufficient overflow capacity should simply be a matter of throwing money at the problem.
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krunaldo 4867 days ago
Nginx introduced least_conn lb method in 1.3.1 which makes it a bit better. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#...

ha-proxy is a lot better than nginx + more flexible if you want to introduce non-http to your stack.

Shouldn't the request be canceled on all levels if you cut the HTTP connection to the frontend?

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