Round-robin Cross Subdomain AJAX Requests
Well, that's a mouthful! But what is it and what is it useful for? If you have done any web development in the last 10 years you have most likely used AJAX to make your web pages or, even more likely your web based app, more responsive and dynamic. You also probably know that most browsers limit the number of concurrent AJAX requests that can be made back to the origin server (i.e. the same server the page is served from). Usually that number of concurrent requests is 6 to 8 (sometimes a bit more) depending of the browser.
This might be fine for what you are trying to do, but if your page has a lot of dynamic components or if you are developing a single page web app, this might make the initial loading of your page, and all its content, a bit slower. After your first 6 (or 8) AJAX requests have fired, any subsequent AJAX query back to that same origin server will be queued and wait. Obviously your AJAX requests should be fairly fast, but even if your AJAX requests are just 50 milliseconds, any request after the initial 6 or 8 would have to wait 50 milliseconds when queued before executing. So in total a request could take 50 milliseconds (waiting) + 50 milliseconds executing = 100 milliseconds. This short waiting times add up pretty quickly.
The solution? Make these requests look like they are going to different origin servers so that the browser will execute them in parallel, even if they are, in fact, going to the same server. This will allow more AJAX requests to run in parallel, and therefore speed up your site/app. Here I will show you how to accomplish this using JQuery (but the same strategy can be used with other frameworks).
Cross subdomain AJAX requests with a single server
The basic idea is pretty simple. Say you are serving your pages from webapp.traackr.com. You will want to send some of the AJAX requests through webapp1.traackr.com, some through webapp2.traackr.com, some through webapp3.traackr.com ...etc. You get the idea. And we will set it up so that all these hosts are, in fact, the same server.
What I will show you here is how to do this transparently so you don't have to manually set up each AJAX request and decide where it should go. Our little trick will randomly round-robin through all the available hosts. This will work even if your application runs on a single server and the best part is that if you need to scale and upgrade to multiple redundant servers you will have little if anything to change.
Easy enough, right? Well of course, there is just one more little thing. When you start making AJAX requests to a host different than the original host, you open the door to security vulnerabilities. I won't go into the specific details of the potential security issues, but suffice it to say that your browser won't let you make these cross-domain (subdomain in our case) requests. Luckily, CORS comes to the rescue. CORS is a rule-based mechanism that allows for secure cross-domain requests. I will show you how to setup the proper CORS headers so everything works seamlessly.
First things first - you will have to create DNS entries for all these subdomain hosts. Because we are doing this with a single server, you need to create DNS entries for webapp1.traackr.com thru webapp3.traackr.com that all resolve to the same host as webapp.traackr.com (they can be AAA or CNAME records). All set? Moving on.
We need to accomplish two things:
(Almost) Randomly round-robin the AJAX request to the various hosts we have just defined
Modify AJAX requests so they can work across subdomains with CORS
Round-robin your AJAX requests
Here we are going to leverage the excellent JQuery framework, so I'm assuming you are using JQuery for all your AJAX requests.
The following Javascript code should be executed as soon as your document is ready. This piece of code uses global AJAX settings in JQuery to hijack all AJAX requests made with JQuery. Once we identify an AJAX request going to the origin server, we rewrite it right before it hits the wire (beforeSend()).
Almost there. Now we need to make sure your server can handle these requests when they come via one of the aliases we defined.
Enable CORS for your AJAX requests
Before we look at the CORS headers needed for these cross-domain AJAX requests to work, you need to understand how cross-domain AJAX requests are different than regular AJAX requests. Because of CORS, your browser needs to ensure the target server will accept and respond to cross-domain AJAX requests. Your browser does this by issuing OPTIONS requests. They are called 'preflighted' requests. These requests are very similar to GET or POST requests except that the server is not required to send anything in the body of the response. The HTTP headers are the only thing that matters in these requests. This diagram illustrates the difference:
So you need to make sure your server returns the proper headers. Remember in the current set up webapp.traackr.com and webapp[1-3].traackr.com are the same server. There are many ways to do this. Here is one that leverages Apache .htaccess config:
Because we allow credentials to be passed in these cross-domain requests, the origin allowed header ('Access-Control-Allow-Origin') must specify a full hostname. You can not use '*', this is a requirement of the CORS specification.
An important note here. Because these OPTIONS calls are made before each AJAX request, you want to make sure they are super fast (i.e. a few milliseconds). Since the only thing that matters are the headers (see above), I recommend you serve a static empty file for these requests. Here is another .htaccess config that will do the trick (make sure options.html exists and is empty):
And that is it! Pop open your JavaScript console and look your AJAX requests being routed through the various aliases and being executed in parallel.
So what trade-offs are you are making? Remember this is engineering, there are always trade-offs! Well all of a sudden you might get twice (or more) as many requests hitting your server in parallel. Make sure it can handle the load.
There are probably a few things you can improve on. I will mention two we use at Traackr but will leave their details as an exercise for the reader:
You will probably want to avoid hardcoding your list of servers in the script.
Some corporate firewalls do not allow OPTIONS requests. This can cause this entire approach to fail. The script we use at Traackr will actually detect errors in OPTIONS requests and will fall back to regular AJAX requests.
Use a load balancer and let it scale
What can you do if/when you need to scale? One easy approach that doesn't require you to change much is to put 2 or more servers behind a load balancer (maybe an Elastic Load Balancer on AWS). Then update your DNS so that all your webapp[1-3].traackr.com URL are now pointing to your load balancer.
What magic happens then? Browsers will make more parallel requests, just as we have described all along here. But now your load balancer will round robin each of these requests to the many servers you have running behind it. Magically you are spreading the load (and the love).
Thank you to the entire awesome Traackr engineering team for the help with this post. We are Traackr, the global and ultimate Influencer Management Platform. Everything you need to discover your influencers, manage key relationships, and measure their impact on your business. Check our blog. We are hiring.
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