The performance impact of Network Load Balancing can be measured in four key areas:
- CPU overhead on the cluster hosts, which is the CPU percentage required to analyze and filter network packets (lower is better).
- Response time to clients, which increases with the non-overlapped portion of CPU overhead, called latency (lower is better).
- Throughput to clients, which increases with additional client traffic that the cluster can handle prior to saturating the cluster hosts (higher is better).
- Switch occupancy, which increases with additional client traffic (lower is better) and must not adversely affect port bandwidth.
In addition, Network Load Balancing's scalability determines how its performance improves as hosts are added to the cluster. Scalable performance requires that CPU overhead and latency not grow faster than the number of hosts.
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