Setting up Lighttpd Load Balancer on EC2 Ubuntu

Lighttpd is an asynchronous server. Along with Nginx, Lighttpd is one of the fast servers designed to counter the C10k problem. If you want to set up Nginx, read Setting up Nginx on EC2 Ubuntu.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to use Lighttpd to load balance application servers.


Creating a EC2 Instance

In the AWS Management Console, begin by creating a t1.micro Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS 64-bit. (If you don't know how to create an instance, read Amazon EC2 - Launching Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS step by step guide.

Here are some guidelines:

• Uncheck Delete on Termination for the root volume
• Add port 22, 80 and 443 to the Security Group, call it lighttpd.

Install Lighttpd

ssh -i {key} ubuntu@{your_ec2_public_address}

sudo apt-get update -y

sudo apt-get install -y lighttpd

Lighttpd should be running. To check its status, run

service lighttpd status

All the configuration files are located in /etc/lighttpd

To enable/disable a module

• Use /usr/sbin/lighty-enable-mod and /usr/sbin/lighty-disable-mod
• Or create a symbolic link from /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/{module} to /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/module

To load balance application servers, we will be using the 10-proxy.conf file as a template.

cd /etc/lighttpd/conf-available

cp 10-proxy.conf 11-proxy.conf

vi 11-proxy.conf

We are interesting in the following two variables:

• proxy.balance - choose from hash, round-robin or fair
• proxy.server - put the servers you want to load balance to

For example:

proxy.balance     = "hash"
proxy.server     = ( "" =>
                     (
                       ( "host" => "10.204.199.85",
                         "port" => 80
                       ),
                       ( "host" => "10.202.111.140",
                         "port" => 80
                       )
                     )
                    )

The above settings will load balance to two other servers based on IP.

Restart the server.

service lighttpd restart

Test the server.

To check the status:

netstat -ntulp