The Neo4j Manual v2.0.323.8. Setting up HAProxy as a load balancer

HAProxy can be configured in many ways. The full documentation is available at their website.

For this example, we will configure HAProxy to load balance requests to three HA servers. Simply write the follow configuration to /etc/haproxy.cfg:

global
    daemon
    maxconn 256

defaults
    mode http
    timeout connect 5000ms
    timeout client 50000ms
    timeout server 50000ms

frontend http-in
    bind *:80
    default_backend neo4j

backend neo4j
    option httpchk GET /db/manage/server/ha/available
    server s1 10.0.1.10:7474 maxconn 32
    server s2 10.0.1.11:7474 maxconn 32
    server s3 10.0.1.12:7474 maxconn 32

listen admin
    bind *:8080
    stats enable

HAProxy can now be started by running:

/usr/sbin/haproxy -f /etc/haproxy.cfg

You can connect to http://<ha-proxy-ip>:8080/haproxy?stats to view the status dashboard. This dashboard can be moved to run on port 80, and authentication can also be added. See the HAProxy documentation for details on this.

Neo4j provides a catalogue of health check URLs (see Section 23.7, “REST endpoint for HA status information”) that HAProxy (or any load balancer for that matter) can use to distinguish machines using HTTP response codes. In the example above we used the /available endpoint, which directs requests to machines that are generally available for transaction processing (they are alive!).

However, it is possible to have requests directed to slaves only, or to the master only. If you are able to distinguish in your application between requests that write, and requests that only read, then you can take advantage of two (logical) load balancers: one that sends all your writes to the master, and one that sends all your read-only requests to a slave. In HAProxy you build logical load balancers by adding multiple backends.

The trade-off here is that while Neo4j allows slaves to proxy writes for you, this indirection unnecessarily ties up resources on the slave and adds latency to your write requests. Conversely, you don’t particularly want read traffic to tie up resources on the master; Neo4j allows you to scale out for reads, but writes are still constrained to a single instance. If possible, that instance should exclusively do writes to ensure maximum write performance.

The following example excludes the master from the set of machines using the /slave endpoint.

global
    daemon
    maxconn 256

defaults
    mode http
    timeout connect 5000ms
    timeout client 50000ms
    timeout server 50000ms

frontend http-in
    bind *:80
    default_backend neo4j-slaves

backend neo4j-slaves
    option httpchk GET /db/manage/server/ha/slave
    server s1 10.0.1.10:7474 maxconn 32 check
    server s2 10.0.1.11:7474 maxconn 32 check
    server s3 10.0.1.12:7474 maxconn 32 check

listen admin
    bind *:8080
    stats enable

Note In practice, writing to a slave is uncommon. While writing to slaves has the benefit of ensuring that data is persisted in two places (the slave and the master), it comes at a cost. The cost is that the slave must immediately become consistent with the master by applying any missing transactions and then synchronously apply the new transaction with the master. This is a more expensive operation than writing to the master and having the master push changes to one or more slaves.

Neo4j HA enables what is called cache-based sharding. If the dataset is too big to fit into the cache of any single machine, then by applying a consistent routing algorithm to requests, the caches on each machine will actually cache different parts of the graph. A typical routing key could be user ID.

In this example, the user ID is a query parameter in the URL being requested. This will route the same user to the same machine for each request.

global
    daemon
    maxconn 256

defaults
    mode http
    timeout connect 5000ms
    timeout client 50000ms
    timeout server 50000ms

frontend http-in
    bind *:80
    default_backend neo4j-slaves

backend neo4j-slaves
    balance url_param user_id
    server s1 10.0.1.10:7474 maxconn 32
    server s2 10.0.1.11:7474 maxconn 32
    server s3 10.0.1.12:7474 maxconn 32

listen admin
    bind *:8080
    stats enable

Naturally the health check and query parameter-based routing can be combined to only route requests to slaves by user ID. Other load balancing algorithms are also available, such as routing by source IP (source), the URI (uri) or HTTP headers(hdr()).