Load Balancing Methods

The main purpose of a Load Balancer is to improve the performance and redundancy of your application.
We use a very popular web server technology that acts as a Load balancer in our CDN. It is simple yet very powerful load balancer and improves your servers resource availability and efficiency.

Introduction

Load balancing across multiple application instances is a commonly used technique for optimizing resource utilization, maximizing throughput, reducing latency, and ensuring fault-tolerant configurations.
We use a very efficient HTTP load balancer to distribute traffic to several application servers and to improve performance, scalability, and reliability of web applications.

The following load balancing mechanisms (or methods) are supported by our CDN system:

Round-Robin

In this method, every request to the application server is distributed in a round-robin fashion.

For example, if there are 3 servers named A, B, and C, every request will go to a new server in the same sequence every time.

A -> B -> C -> A and so on.

Least-Connected

In this method, every new request is assigned to the server with the least number of active connections,

For example, if there are 3 servers

A - 32 connections

B - 41 connections

C - 27 connections

Any new request will be logically assigned to 'C' because it has the least number of active connections.

IP-Hash

This method uses an algorithm that takes the source and destination IP address of the client and server and generates a unique hash key. This key is used to allocate the client to a particular server. As the key can be regenerated if the session is broken, this method of load balancing can ensure that the client is directed to the same server that it was using previously.

Z= Hashed value of URL, domain, source ip, destination ip, call id, token, etc