What is Load Balancing

In today’s fast-paced and highly digital lifestyle, the Internet is the best resource for information, entertainment, knowledge-gathering, and even socialization. If you own a popular website or blog, you might find that your website slows down because there are too many visitors to your site and the server cannot handle them. This is where you need server balancing or load balancing.

Server balancing involves dividing the amount of work a server has to do between two or more servers so they can process more work in the same period of time. All inbound traffic gets distributed across several servers to enhance the overall performance of all servers by utilizing all their capacities and traffic balancing. Load balancing, in other words, makes sure that no one server is overwhelmed by traffic. Load balancing is an essential procedure in all busy networks because it becomes difficult to determine the exact number of visitors that will enter a server.

In a server balancing scheme, two or more web servers are involved to avoid overloading. In the instance that one of the servers receives too much traffic, the load balancer receives a webpage request, which then gets forwarded to an available server. The available server then responds to the load balancer’s request, and the traffic gets redirected to another server that has the capacity to receive the incoming traffic. What’s great about load balancing is that the website is still up and running even when there’s server downtime due to server maintenance or server failure. When you load balance using several servers and one of these servers get overloaded or fail, the traffic will simply be redirected to other servers who can take on the requests.

If all this tech talk is making you dizzy and confused, think of server balancing using this real world analogy. You own a restaurant and you only have one chef. As your restaurant becomes more popular, the chef gets busier and busier with the number of orders he has to fulfill. Eventually, there will come a time when the chef can no longer keep up with the stream of customers. How can you solve this dilemma? By hiring another chef. When a new order is sent to the kitchen, the chef with less to do will take the order and fulfill it accordingly. This way, both of the chefs avoid getting bogged down by too many orders and all orders are fulfilled faster. When more chefs are hired, more orders get accomplished, even if one of the chefs calls in sick or is late for work.

There are different types of server balancing methods that you can use. If the servers have similar hardware specs, the best method to use is the Fastest Response Time Method or the Perceptive Method, which predicts what servers to use based on current data and logs. If the servers have different hardware specs, the Weighted Round Robin technique is best. This redirects traffic to servers according to their respective weights and capacities, giving more work to servers who can take more and reducing the load on servers with limited capacities.