1.3.2. Server Weight and Scheduling

The administrator of LVS can assign a weight to each node in the real server pool. This weight is an integer value which is factored into any weight-aware scheduling algorithms (such as weighted least-connections) and helps the LVS router more evenly load hardware with different capabilities.

Weights work as a ratio relative to one another. For instance, if one real server has a weight of 1 and the other server has a weight of 5, then the server with a weight of 5 gets 5 connections for every 1 connection the other server gets. The default value for a real server weight is 1.

Although adding weight to varying hardware configurations in a real server pool can help load-balance the cluster more efficiently, it can cause temporary imbalances when a real server is introduced to the real server pool and the virtual server is scheduled using weighted least-connections. For example, suppose there are three servers in the real server pool. Servers A and B are weighted at 1 and the third, server C, is weighted at 2. If server C goes down for any reason, servers A and B evenly distributes the abandoned load. However, once server C comes back online, the LVS router sees it has zero connections and floods the server with all incoming requests until it is on par with servers A and B.

To prevent this phenomenon, administrators can make the virtual server a quiesce server — anytime a new real server node comes online, the least-connections table is reset to zero and the LVS router routes requests as if all the real servers were newly added to the cluster.