Managing a Large Number of Connections

When you have several instances of the ESP SOAP Web Service Provider which need to serve a large number of connections, you can use a reverse proxy to help manage these connections. There are various third-party tools designed to proxy HTTP traffic, such as the Apache mod_proxy module. You can also use this module for load balancing.

For details on configuring the mod_proxy module to load balance SOAP connections, see the Apache documentation.

Reverse Proxy Example

Here is an example of using the Apache mod_proxy module to manage two instances of the ESP SOAP Provider, WSP1 and WSP2, running on two separate machines, host1 and host2. First, define mappings for HTTP requests by mapping the aliases WSP1 and WSP2:

ProxyPass /WSP1 http://host1:9090
ProxyPass /WSP2 http://host2:9090

Assuming that the Apache server is running on a machine named proxyhost which is running on port 9090, change the URI used to access the SOAP service to include the mappings. For example, instead of

http://host1:9090/espws/services/ESPWebService

use

http://proxyhost:9090/WSP1/espws/services/ESPWebService

http://proxyhost:9090/WSP2/espws/services/ESPWebService