Which is the best network load balancer?

Posted by juliabennet on May 20th, 2014

Is there any single solution to all the problems in any field? No, it is simply not possible to fit one shoe to all. This is applicable to network load balancer as well and one must choose a load balancer depending on his/her system configuration and end use. For example, DNS round robin load balancers are extremely easy to implement and manage. But they have some inherent drawbacks. For those who cannot employ this technique may deploy tomcat load balancing. Tomcat clustering allows you to run an application on several parallel servers or cluster nodes.

In DNS round robin the problem was with the structure of the architecture. A network load balancer uses intelligent techniques to measure the TTL or Time To Live and respond times and accordingly tries to maintain a connection with the server till that time that is needed to complete the user session. But if the server appointed is failing and cannot continue to service the network users, then also it will be assigned. But with tomcat load balancing the load is distributed across multiple servers, and even if one of the servers fails, the application can still be accessed with the help of other cluster nodes. This clustering technique is critical when you are looking for scalability for your enterprise applications.

With tomcat load balancing you can improve the performance simply by adding more nodes to the cluster. Along with scalability and working as network load balancer, clustering also presents high availability. This ensures failover where if one server of the cluster becomes inaccessible, other servers from the cluster take over. This happens in a smooth way so that your end user remains unaffected. You can provide the failover capabilities in two ways: Request-level failover or Session-level failover.

Tomcat load balancing with clustering for Request-level failover sees to it that if one among the servers in the cluster goes down, all subsequent requests get redirected to the other functional servers. This is generally done with heartbeat mechanism for keeping track of the server status. This helps in avoiding sending requests to the server that is not responding at that time. With this kind of network load balancer you can minimize session-level failover efficiently as well. We know that HTTP clients can have sessions that would be maintained by the HTTP servers. But, in session level failover, if one server in the cluster goes down, other servers in the cluster take up with the sessions. This again happens with minimal loss of continuity. The session data are replaced across the cluster in other servers to ensure this continuity.

With Tomcat load balancing architecture users are connected to tomcat instance nodes (more than one) via the web server. The network load balancer distributes the load among your servers that are available in the cluster in order to provide the best possible response time to your end users. The load distribution algorithm distributes requests to the servers by keeping track of the load as well as available resources on the servers.

Efficient network load balancer with tomcat load balancing can make the experience great for your customers.