steffdavies / mr-bix Goto Github PK

A TCP proxy of sorts, in which an incoming connection becomes two outgoing
connections, only one of which returns data to the original incoming connection
as with a normal TCP proxy - data returned from the other is discarded.

"What use is that?"

Consider two machines, one of which has known performance, while the other has
unknown performance. By interposing Mr Bix between these machines and whatever
is making TCP connections to them, both machines can handle the same requests
at the same time, while clients only see the responses from the known-good
machine.

Run it like this:

mrbix 1234 1.2.3.4 2345 2.3.4.5 3456

to listen on port 1234 and redirect traffic to 1.2.3.4:2345 (known good) and
2.3.4.5:3456 (under test). Then simply graph whatever you're interested in
on both machines with your favourite monitoring tool and compare the graphs
to get a picture of performance under real-world load. Since Mr Bix works at the
level of TCP connections, this should work for databases, web servers, file
servers and many other things.

"Why 'Mr Bix'"?

See http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2000-02-01/index.html
and http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2000-06-13/index.html