Load balancing servers for optimal performance
Servers are expected to provide high performance, high availability, and secure and scalable solutions to support all applications at all times. However, the availability of these applications is often threatened by network overloads as well as server and application failures.
Resource utilisation is often out of balance, resulting in the low-performance resources being overloaded with requests while the high-performance resources remain idle. Load balancing servers are a widely adopted solution to these performance and availability problems.
Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster.
Load balancing can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both. Typically, load balancing is the main reason for computer server clustering.
Server load balancing addresses several requirements that are becoming increasingly important in networks:
- Increased scalability
- High performance
- High availability and disaster recovery
Why is load balancing of servers needed?
If there is only one web server responding to all the incoming HTTP requests for your website, the capacity of the web server may not be able to handle high volumes of incoming traffic once the website becomes popular.
The website's pages will load slowly as some of the users will have to wait until the web server is free to process their requests. The increase in traffic and connections to your website can lead to a point where upgrading the server hardware will no longer be cost effective.
In order to achieve web server scalability, more servers need to be added to distribute the load among the group of servers, which is also known as a server cluster. The load distribution among these servers is known as load balancing.
For a guide to the different types of hosting available to you and a list of useful sources related to the Internet and load balancing click on the link.
