Product Information

NetLink is a load balancing service that runs on top of XF Rendering Service.

Load balancing means distributing processing and communications activity evenly across a computer network so that no single server is overwhelmed. Busy sites typically employ two or more servers in a load balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity.

What it solves

• Process more documents in less time.
• Ensures reliability by retrying failed requests on different machines.

The load balancing service is completely transparent to the applications and it can be configured entirely using the XF Management Console.

Technical Details

NetLink uses Round-Robin load balancing scheme, which ensures that all computers are used evenly. The load balancing service is completely transparent to those applications that call XF Rendering Server – they will simply take advantage of it.

Usage scenarios

1. One web server that uses other computers to increase the processing capacity
   • The web server can forward requests to all worker nodes but it can also use the local resources to process documents.
   • The local server can also be used for load balancing, or it can be excluded. In this latest scenario, all requests are forwarded to the remote computers.
2. Multiple servers sharing a pool of computers
   • Is a cost effective way to obtain formidable scalability and reliability; nodes can be added and removed dynamically without any downtime.