Optimizing Network Performance with Modern Load Balancers

1. Load Balancer

A load balancer is the device that controls the distribution of network or application traffic across several servers. It is both physical and virtual. Its main purpose is to prevent the server from overloading. It improves the reliability of the network and provides network bandwidth. It also aids in traffic control for the betterment of the flow of traffic within the network.

2. Network Performance

Network performance could be described as the ability of a network to transfer data over the existing network links based on factors such as bandwidth, delay, throughput, and error rates. It encompasses the proper organization of the elements of the network in a configuration that would permit efficient transfer of data within the network without any delay.

3. Latency

Latency on the other hand refers to the period taken in bringing out data from one point in the network to the other. The reason is that video conferencing and gaming are some real-time applications; therefore, they cannot afford high latency rates. A load balancer improves the efficiency of data transfer because it redirects traffic to the server that happens to be least busy thereby reducing the latency period.

4. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the capability of a network to transmit data in a specified time frame. It differs from the amount of data that could be transmitted within a specified time frame. In the case of bandwidth, load balancers do not offer any more bandwidth, but they aid in the best exploitation of the existing bandwidth by dividing the traffic across several resources without overloading any one of them.

5. Server Load

Server load can be described as work that is expected to be carried out by a server. This might include processing incoming requests and handling queries in order to bring out web pages. A situation where a server records excessive load may slow it down or even stop its services. This is where the help of a load balancer comes in that assists in trying to optimize the performance of a network by spreading server loads across multiple available servers, in a manner that does not allow only one server to overwork.

6. Round Robin Algorithm

The Round Robin is one of the most primitive yet widely used load balancing schemes. It schedules each incoming request sequentially to a set of servers on the principle of scheduling. This manner makes all incoming requests distributed throughout the servers, so no server is overloaded with work. However, it does not consider the different power of the processing servers that are involved in the system especially when working in a heterogeneous system.

7. Least Connections Algorithm

The Least Connections algorithm will split the traffic to the server, which has the least number of active connections. This enables load balancers to send traffic to the available servers in a more efficient way, especially when some servers are occupied with heavy work or slower than others. It also enhances the efficiency of the network through selection of least-traffic loaded servers.

8. Weighted Load Balancing

Weighted Load Balancing means load is redistributed considering certain weights assigned to each server. The traffic is divided according to servers with higher performance as well as increased computing power. This is very useful when servers are of different capacity as well as the strongest ones which do not process a disproportionate number of requests .

9. Health Checks

Health checks are the tests that a load balancer executes to ensure that the servers in the network are available or not. Health check is a process used by the load balancer in testing whether or not the server is accessible. In case the server is healthy then the load balancer allows the traffic to pass through to the server, but in case if some given server is unhealthy, then the load balancer will divert the traffic to other servers assumed to be healthy.