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I am totally clueless why this well formed question is getting downvotes:

https://serverfault.com/questions/620044/load-balancer-for-messenger

I've done research and put the info I got, It's crystal clear on what I want to ask (is it not?) and I am sure it is useful for those who want to launch messenger service in future. Thus all three attributes for a question to downvote, not applicable here. Still downvotes !! Disheartening :-(

Still I am willing to improve question.

But how on this earth can I find out why there are downvotes to the question?

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    I don't agree that the question is useful as it stands.
    – Jenny D
    Aug 13, 2014 at 12:20
  • @Andrew welcome to the club, I got downvoted because some folk doesn't see the point of a web interface over command line: serverfault.com/q/620282/126950 Aug 14, 2014 at 5:29

3 Answers 3

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This question really is not useful as-is, not to the community, and not even to yourself.

You are essentially asking us to choose a load balancing and/or high availability solution for your service, without providing any information about the service, and quite possibly without even having built a prototype of the service!

This is not going to work.

Every service has its own unique characteristics which make certain LB/HA strategies more useful, or even necessary, and so without knowing much more about the design of the service it's really impossible to give a good answer.

As it stands, any attempts at answers would either make a recommendation likely to be bad, or break the post length limit trying to explain basic concepts, or possibly both.


Before you move forward, make sure that you have a working service with five users: your group of developers at your startup, or wherever you are, should be dogfooding it. Only when you have both a minimum viable product and a growing userbase should you even begin to think about scaling it.

And if you haven't done so already, you should study existing open source solutions very carefully. You probably should be using one.

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I already commented on your question, and I'm not one of the downvoters.

While I think the question is written reasonable (and thus should not be downvoted IMHO), I do believe that the question should be closed, because it is way too broad.

We don't know your exact scenario. Any one of the solutions you posted can be used. Free service / money constraint? Use software LB. Paid service? Use hardware LB. Using NLB over other Software LB's? Depends on your scenario. Using DNS as LB? depends on your scenario. There are way too many variables in that question.

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The research the community asks of you is the research to answer your question, not to ask it. I freely accept that you've done enough research to find out what load-balancing options are generally available, but if you hadn't done that I suspect the question would look like "I need to know about load balancers, please help me" and would already have been closed.

What we're looking for you to do is research towards answering the question as asked, so that we don't duplicate work you've already done. If you haven't done any such work, then a downvote may be appropriate.

But as others have already noted, the question as written could have a whole book by way of answer - see, eg, http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000509.do - and is thus almost certainly too broad for SF. Our guidelines are fairly clear on that:

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

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