# Hot Standby Hot Standby

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hot-standby-hot-standby/153810>\
**Category:** NGINX\
**Created:** [November 21, 2008, 11:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hot-standby-hot-standby/153810 "2008-11-21T11:12:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/22d042/32.png) [@Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Stephen_Nelson-Smit)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2008, 11:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hot-standby-hot-standby/153810/1 "2008-11-21T11:12:27Z")

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Following on from testing yesterday, I can’t see a way to do this:

- Traffic —\> backend1

- backend1 fails

- Traffic —\> backend2 (hot standby)

- backend2 fails

- Traffic —\> backend3 (2nd hot standby)

ie we cannot have a hot-standby-hot-standby.

The best I have come up with is weighting the two backup backends, so  
only a very small amount of traffic goes to one of the two live backup  
machines. This isn’t ideal - the spec I need to meet is to have two  
tiers of failover, with the app only ever running on a single  
instance.

How can I achieve this? Is it possible?

S.

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**Author:** ![Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/22d042/32.png) [@Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Stephen_Nelson-Smit)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2008, 11:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hot-standby-hot-standby/153810/2 "2008-11-21T11:40:04Z")

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stupid question, why your idea is any better than having 3 loadbalanced  
servers?

anyway, what you are asking can be done with recursive error\_pages.

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**Author:** ![Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/22d042/32.png) [@Stephen\_Nelson-Smit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Stephen_Nelson-Smit)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2008, 1:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hot-standby-hot-standby/153810/3 "2008-11-21T13:51:02Z")

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Hi,

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Almir K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)  
wrote:

> stupid question, why your idea is any better than having 3 loadbalanced  
> servers?

Just because the application isn’t very good - it doesn’t play nicely  
running concurrently on more than one server,

> anyway, what you are asking can be done with recursive error\_pages.

Could you expand upon this?

S.