HLB: Toward Load-Aware Load Balancing

Abstract

The purpose of network load balancers is to optimize quality of service to the users of a set of servers– basically, to improve response times and to reducing computing resources– by properly distributing workloads. This paper proposes a distributed, application-agnostic, Hybrid Load Balancer (HLB) that– without explicit monitoring or signaling– infers server occupancies and processing speeds, which allows making optimised workload placement decisions. This approach is evaluated both through simulations and extensive experiments, including synthetic workloads and Wikipedia replays on a real-world testbed. Results show significant performance gains, in terms of both response time and system utilisation, when compared to existing load-balancing algorithms.