Preliminary Study on the Difference of Web Services Load Balancing Performance in Theory and Practice

Web service load balancing is a process of distributing workload over multiple servers to support and ensure high availability and better performance in modern applications. The purpose of load balancing is to reduce the number of tasks each server processes to make them more efficient, increase performance, and reduce latency. The theoretical aspect of load balancing can be studied through queueing theory - a branch of mathematics that studies how lines form and how they function to predict queue length and time to process a task in a queue. The results can then be applied to achieve better load balancing. However, queueing theory does have some limitations; that is, it relies on some assumptions (e.g., arrival rate of tasks, and their complexity), which can lead to different behavior in practice than what was predicted. This paper aims to compare the expected results of several web service load balancing algorithms got through queueing theory and the performance of the same web service load balancing algorithms in practice to see if there are any differences, and if there are, how big they are.