Load Balancing Techniques

In system design, load balancing plays a critical role in distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers or resources to ensure optimal performance, scalability, and availability. Here are some load balancing techniques commonly used to achieve low latency in system design:

• Round Robin Load Balancing: Distributes incoming requests across a pool of servers in a sequential manner. Each new request is forwarded to the next server in the list, ensuring an even distribution of traffic. While simple to implement, round-robin load balancing may not account for variations in server capacity or workload.
• Least Connection Load Balancing: Routes new requests to the server with the fewest active connections at the time of request. This technique aims to distribute incoming traffic evenly based on server load, ensuring that requests are sent to servers with available capacity to handle them.
• Weighted Round Robin Load Balancing: Assigns a weight to each server based on its capacity or performance characteristics. Servers with higher weights receive a larger share of incoming requests, while servers with lower weights handle less traffic. This approach allows for more fine-grained control over traffic distribution, enabling administrators to prioritize certain servers over others.
• Least Response Time Load Balancing: Routes new requests to the server with the lowest average response time or latency over a predefined period. By dynamically monitoring server performance, this technique directs traffic to servers that can respond most quickly, minimizing latency for end-users.
• IP Hash Load Balancing: Uses a hash function to map client IP addresses to specific backend servers. Requests from the same client IP address are consistently routed to the same server, which can be beneficial for maintaining session persistence or cache affinity. However, this approach may result in uneven distribution of traffic if client IP addresses are not evenly distributed.
• Dynamic Load Balancing: Adapts load balancing decisions dynamically based on real-time monitoring of server health, performance metrics, and network conditions. Dynamic load balancers continuously adjust traffic distribution to ensure optimal resource utilization and responsiveness, even in the face of changing workload patterns.

By employing these load balancing techniques strategically, system designers can optimize resource utilization, improve responsiveness, and achieve low latency in distributed systems.

Low Latency Design Patterns help to make computer systems faster by reducing the time it takes for data to be processed. In this article, we will talk about ways to build systems that respond quickly, especially for businesses related to finance, gaming, and telecommunications where speed is really important. It explains different techniques, like storing data in a cache to access it faster, doing tasks at the same time to speed things up, and breaking tasks into smaller parts to work on them simultaneously.