Understanding Application Server Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of distributing workload across multiple servers to maximize throughput, achieve optimal resource utilization, minimize response time, and avoid overload. The Load Balancers applies to all types of servers such as web server, database server, application server and so on. Load balancing, thus, provides a strategic point of control for optimizing the availability, security and performance of enterprise applications, IP data services and data center equipment.
An application server becomes overload when the application that it runs tries to process more connections and requests that it possibly can. While trying to process the requests, the application uses up more compute resources thereby slowing down operations. This leads to poor application performance.
The key to this problem is server load balancing. In order to prevent an application server from getting overload, a second server (or additional servers) and a load balancing appliance is added so that the total load is distributed among the servers. Since the workload is equally balanced, the load on each server is considerably reduced. As a result, each server performs only less work leading to faster execution and better application performance.
An important advantage of load balancing is that load balancing appliances accelerate overall application performance by taking vital decisions such as which server should respond when a request comes in. It tracks the response time of each application and by using an algorithm named “fastest response time” selects the server that needs to respond to a request.
Load balancing comes useful in the case of not only physical servers but also virtual servers. Load balancing is all about freeing up resources by offloading workload. Even if there is only one server it accelerates the execution time and enhances the application performance through different techniques such as cookie encryption/decryption, caching, SSL processing, compression, and so on.
Benefits of Load Balancing
Today there are several load balancing appliances available. The following are some of the benefits of one such appliance.
* Advanced, application-fluent traffic management for optimized delivery of business critical applications and IP services
* Integrated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for a 5X improvement in application performance
* Local and global server load balancing with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime and data center scalability
* Offloading of Web and application servers for increased efficiency, capacity and return on investment
* SSL acceleration for securing data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and improving application performance
* Reverse-proxy architecture with a stateful packet-inspection firewall for guarding applications without impacting performance
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