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+---
+title: Pen/Balance
+inMenu: true
+directoryName: Pen/Balance
+---
+
+h1. Pen/Balance Best Practice Deployment
+
+Using "Pen":http://siag.nu/pen/ or "Balance":http://www.inlab.de/balance.html to serve
+a cluster of Mongrel servers is a simple way to get good concurrency without 
+going wild on your deployment complexity.  What these two programs do is listen on one
+port and then proxy the requests to one of the Mongrel servers in your cluster.
+
+h2. Requirements
+
+First up, you should learn to use "mongrel_cluster":/docs/mongrel_cluster.html to manage
+a cluster of Mongrel servers.  It's a simple GemPlugin that simplifies things and also
+works better with Capistrano.
+
+Second, you need to install wither Pen or Balance.  Either use your package management
+system or install from source.
+
+Finally, you probably can't do this on win32 unless you use Cygwin.
+
+h2. Pen
+
+Once you get Pen installed you just use it like this:
+
+# Make sure that you can run your application like normal and then 
+setup "mongrel_cluster":/docs/mongrel_cluster.html so that all of the running Mongrels work.
+# Run this command: pen -H 4000 localhost:3000 localhost:3001 
+# Check port 4000 to make sure that Pen is proxying correctly.
+
+As with the Balance instructions below you'll want to create a start-up script so that
+Pen gets started on machine reboots.  The -H adds a "X-Forwarded-For" header to the 
+request, which helps if you need to track the client's IP address.  There's plenty
+of other options for pen as well.
+
+NOTE: Pen has experimental support for SSL.  Try it out if you need SSL.
+
+h2. Balance
+
+Balance is pretty simple:
+
+# Make sure that you can run your application like normal and then 
+setup "mongrel_cluster":/docs/mongrel_cluster.html so that all of the running Mongrels work.
+# Run this command:  balance 4000 localhost:3001 localhost:3002 ...
+# Hit port 4000 with a browser to see if it's working.
+
+That's all there is to it.  You might want to write a little start-up script that
+starts balance on machine reboots.  Balance has many other options available if 
+you need to do more complex stuff, but this is usually all people need.
+
+h2. Limitations
+
+We found that Balance has an upper limit of 15 backend servers.  I haven't heard much
+about Pen, but it's experimental SSL support is interesting.