Web server load balancing is essential when a website starts gaining more traffic than it is capable of handling or in case of dynamic web page services being provided by the website. A web server's performance is restricted by the underlying hardware and the available bandwidth. Load balancing a web server can effectively improve website performance and also increase the availability of the web services being provided by the web server.
Why is Web Server Load Balancing Essential
The performance of a web server depends completely on the underlying hardware and the bandwidth available to it. Under such restrictions, a web server is only capable of responding to a limited number of requests from clients. In a situation where more number of requests are made to the server than it can actually handle, a bottleneck situation occurs where the other requests wait till the server has finished responding to the previous requests. This results in a slow performance by the website from a user's point of view.
Also, if the services provided by the website are dynamic in nature such as dynamically generated content in response to a client request script, the limitations of the server increase many folds. This again results in a slow website.