Introduction

HAProxy (http://www.haproxy.org/) is a free, fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

MarkLogic 8 (8.0-8 and above) and MarkLogic 9 (9.0-4 and above) include improvements to allow you to use HAProxy to connect to MarkLogic Server.

MarkLogic Server supports balancing application requests using both the HAProxy TCP and HTTP balancing modes depending on the transaction mode being used by the MarkLogic application as detailed below:

1. For single-statement auto-commit transactions running on MarkLogic version 8.0.7 and earlier or MarkLogic version 9.0.3 and earlier, only TCP mode balancing is supported. This is due to the fact that the SessionID cookie and transaction id (txid) are only generated as part of a multi-statement transaction.
2. For multi-statement transactions or for single-statement auto-commit transactions running on MarkLogic version 8.0.8 and later or MarkLogic version 9.0.4 and later both TCP and HTTP balancing modes can be configured.

The Understanding Transactions in MarkLogic Server and Single vs. Multi-statement Transactions in the MarkLogic documentation should be referenced to determine whether your application is using single or multi-statement transactions.

Note: Attempting to use HAProxy in HTTP mode with Single-statement transactions prior to MarkLogic versions 8.0.8 or 9.0.4 can lead to unpredictable results.

Example configurations

The following example configurations detail only the parameters relevant to enabling load balancing of a MarkLogic application, for details of all parameters that can be used please refer to the HAProxy documentation.

TCP mode balancing

The following configuration is an example of how to balance requests to a 3-node MarkLogic application using the "roundrobin" balance algorithm based on the source IP address. The health of each node is checked by a TCP probe to the application server every 1 second.

backend app
mode tcp
balance roundrobin
stick-table type ip size 200k expire 30m
stick on src
default-server inter 1s
server app1 ml-node-1:8012 check id 1
server app2 ml-node-2:8012 check id 2
server app3 ml-node-3:8012 check id 3

HTTP mode balancing

The following configuration is an example of how to balance requests to a 3-node MarkLogic application using the "roundrobin" balance algorithm based on the "SessionID" cookie inserted by the MarkLogic server.

The health of each node is checked by issuing an HTTP GET request to the MarkLogic health check port and checking for the "Healthy" response.

backend app
mode http
balance roundrobin
cookie SessionID prefix nocache
option httpchk GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ monitoring\r\nConnection:\ close
http-check expect string Healthy
server app1 ml-node-1:8012 check port 7997 cookie app1
server app2 ml-node-2:8012 check port 7997 cookie app2
server app3 ml-node-3:8012 check port 7997 cookie app3