Load Balancing Problems

Friday, May 08, 2009


It has been a very busy day for me and my colleagues and we are on the verge of taking our day off. We would be able to finish a lot of our work but it seems our Internet connection is taking a toll on our servers. We are Linux based and we manage traffic on our Routers but in this particular week, we feel there was something major wrong about how slow everything is. We did not experience this the other week so we did investigate the incident today. The Load Balance capability of the Router seems not working. We have a few Static IP addresses we bought from Eastern Telecommunications and BAYANTEL which are local phone carriers.

I have been configuring Routers for 3 years and I say I have been a skeptic because I thought our products were flawless about this particular problem and the only culprit I could think of was on the ISP side. I was shocked because we were working fine a few hours ago. I asked other departments for the logs and was dumbfounded that this only happens when Load Balancing kicks in. It was supposed to cure the problem about our bandwidth needs but it seems when we have this feature working on our Routers, which is the only time everything comes into a snail's pace. They rebooted our router and we had that connection problem again, but if we only stayed with one ISP connection the Internet becomes normal again. We removed this configuration from the router and everything was okay. We checked for latest updates for the CISCO Router we were using and flashed the enterprise router with the last update then boom! We were back in business. The trial and error method took a couple of hours and we were a little behind schedule on our work. With this problem resolved, maybe we can still catch up and take that well deserved break we need. This is another case of unequal load balancing according to an article we read off another site. At least that explains what happened there. I hope geeks like me do not have to spend days to find out this simple problem next time. It would definitely cost a lot of money for enterprise sized businesses like ours. Thank God!


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