# The net/pen port

## pen-0.18.0 – load balancer for simple TCP-based protocols

## Description

    Allows several servers to appear as one to the outside and automatically
    detects servers that are down and distributes clients among the
    available servers. This gives high availability and scalable
    performance.

    The load balancing algorithm keeps track of clients and will try to send
    them back to the server they visited the last time. The client table has
    a number of slots (2048 by default). When the table is full, the least
    recently used one will be thrown out to make room for the new one. When
    pen detects that a server is unavailable, it scans for another starting
    with the server after the most recently used one. That way we get load
    balancing and "fair" failover for free.

    A side-effect of the load-balancing is that several logfiles are
    produced, and all accesses seem to come from the load balancer. The
    program mergelogs solves this problem by merging pen's log file with the
    ones produced by the web servers.

WWW: http://siag.nu/pen/

Categories:
  net

## Library dependencies

## Build dependencies

- STEM->=1.21:textproc/groff

## Run dependencies