Performance Comparisons of Web Server Load Balancing Algorithms on HAProxy and Heartbeat

Abstract

Popular websites such as Google and Facebook are accessed by an extremely large clients and providing such clients only with a single web server is absolutely insufficient. To support service availability, two or more servers are required. This, however, needs a load balancing system. A load balancing server receives web traffic and distributes the requests to such multiple servers. Load balancing can be implemented with special hardware, software or a combination of both. The purpose of this research is to develop a load balancing system with HAProxy as a software-based load balancer and Heartbeat as failover software. The research also provides comparisons of the performance of several balancing algorithms on the system. The results show that without a load balancer, the load cannot equally be distributed. The system average failover time when an active server down is 10ms. The Leastconn algorithm, in general, outperformed the Round-Robin and Source algorithms in terms of connection rate, response time, throughput, and failed connection.