Mantrid Documentation

Mantrid is the HTTP load balancer used for Epio. It is designed with high availability and simplicity in mind: it is configured at runtime with JSON over HTTP and can temporarily hold open connections while backend servers restart. It monitors bandwidth and connection statistics and is ideal for serving large numbers of hostnames.

It trades some raw speed for flexibility, but is still designed to be fast. Its aim is to have latency of no more than 10ms, and have no more than a 10% reduction in throughput.

It is available on GitHub.

Installation

If you haven’t got pip installed, install it from a system package (python-pip on Ubuntu and Debian) or run:

$ sudo easy_install pip

Then run:

$ sudo pip install mantrid

You can improve performance by using PyPy 1.7 or greater. Just use the pypy-specific pip to install it. At the time of writing, PyPy 1.7 is not yet released, but a nightly build will work.

Quick start

To run Mantrid with a default configuration, just run:

$ sudo mantrid

(Or run mantrid as root.) Mantrid needs root in order to bind to port 80 and set its resource limits. It automatically drops to a less privileged user once it has started up.

The default configuration is to serve external clients on port 80 (from all available addresses), and to have management on port 8042 bound to localhost.

See the Guide: A Simple Setup article for a walkthrough of an initial, simple installation.

Configuration

Mantrid will look for startup configuration in /etc/mantrid/mantrid.conf by default. You can specify an alternative location on the command line:

$ mantrid -c /home/andrew/mantrid.conf

The configuration file is in the format variable_name = value and comments are denoted by starting them with a #. For available configuration options, see the The configuration file page.

Note that the configuration file only tells Mantrid how to start up; configuring hostnames and Mantrid’s responses are done via the REST API. You can use the included mantrid-client tool to interact with the REST API. For more information, read Configuring rules.

Running as a normal user

If you only make Mantrid listen on port 1024 or greater, there is no need to run it as root. Mantrid won’t be able to automatically change resource limits as a normal user, but you can do it manually with things like ulimit or pam_limits.

Table Of Contents

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The configuration file

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