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Welcome to Crossroads

Crossroads is an open source load balance and fail over utility for TCP based services. It is a daemon running in user space, and features extensive configurability, polling of back ends using 'wakeup calls', detailed status reporting, 'hooks' for special actions when backend calls fail, and much more. Crossroads is service-independent: it is usable for HTTP(S), SSH, SMTP, DNS, etc.. In the case of HTTP balancing, Crossroads can provide 'session stickiness' for back end processes that need sessions, but aren't session-aware of other back ends.

As of version 2.00, Crossroads has undergone dramatic changes. The program is no longer a "forking daemon", but instead, a multi-threaded program that occupies only one memory space. The performance is hence greatly increased when compared to the Crossroads 1.xx series. The new Crossroads uses another invocation syntax. If you are a user of the 1.xx series, please read the documentation - your balancer setup is likely to change. Older versions are however still available (securely stored on our dedicated servers) from the /downloads/versions/ page.

This site is the primary hosting site of Crossroads. Here you'll find the most up to date documentation, the software itself, and you can browse the current source base via an SVN browser.

Please use the left side menu for: Most recent version:

Join the forum! If you're interested in Crossroads, if you use it, if you want to know more... join the Crossroads forum at http://xrforum.org. There are sections on getting help, future versions, feature requests, and more!

The heaviest Crossroads user known to us is a websearch company, who in January 2008 ran over 5 million page hits per day via Crossroads. They were requests for dynamic pages, load-balanced using Crossroads' HTTP balancing. This is on average 60 Crossroads requests per second flat rate, climbing to approx. 250 per second. The same Crossroads instance also balanced 300-500 database connections that carried approx. 50Gb of data. The Linux box where Crossroads was running, was 50% idle.

The best throughput was achieved by Rene Kalff during benchmarking. Crossroads, running on a dedicated 32bits Linux box, 2.2Gb dual core with 2Gigs of RAM. Crossroads in HTTP mode managed to dispatch 3.500 requests per second to 4 back ends. It wouldn't go higher because the testing client couldn't handle more.

Do you run Crossroads, and do you have similar usage data? Let us know, we're always interested in how Crossroads is doing out there.

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