[tor-dev] [Question to sysadmins and HS operators:] How should Hidden Services scale?

[Nicolas Vigier]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013, George Kadianakis wrote:

> 
> For this reason we started wondering whether DNS-round-robin-like
> scalability is actually worth such trouble. AFAIK most big websites
> use DNS round-robin, but is it necessary? What about application-layer
> solutions like HAProxy? Do application-layer load balancing solutions
> exist for other (stateful) protocols (IRC, XMPP, etc.)?

I think HAProxy and DNS round-robin solve different kinds of scalability
issues:

- the application running behind the hidden service is taking too much
  ressources for a single node. Something like HAProxy can help split
  the application on multiple nodes, but all traffic still go through a
  single node.

- the network bandwidth that a single node can have or the number of
  connections it can handle is not enough. A solution like HAProxy
  doesn't help, because everything still has to go through a single
  node. I think the DNS round-robin is used to solve this kind of
  problem.