load balancing at fastmail.fm

[Nik Conwell]

On Jan 12, 2007, at 10:43 PM, Rob Mueller wrote:

> Yep, this means we need quite a bit more software to manage the  
> setup, but now that it's done, it's quite nice and works well. For  
> maintenance, we can safely fail all masters off a server in a few  
> minutes, about 10-30 seconds a store. Then we can take the machine  
> down, do whatever we want, bring it back up, wait for replication  
> to catch up again, then fail any masters we want back on to the  
> server.

Just curious how you do this - do you just stop the masters and then  
change the proxy to point to the replica?  Webmail users shouldn't  
notice this but don't the desktop IMAP clients notice?