Sticky load balancing - experiences?

[pauljohansson]

Hi,

Anyone with any experience regarding "Sticky Load balancing" that is now a built in option in the virtual proxy:

The documentation is very limited -  "Optionally, select Sticky load balancing. With this enabled, the proxy service will attempt to redirect all app open requests to an engine where the app is already open."

Anyone with practical experience to share? If this works, why would there be a reason not to have it enabled?

Thanks in advance,

br

Paul

[StephanieR]

Hello, load balancing is interesting and I think the stickly load balancer can really assist performance in the multi node environment. However there are pros and cons see below it might help a bit
Pros:

More efficient use of data and memory. Since you are persisting data to one server, you are not required to share the persisted data across your application’s servers. Similarly, data stored in a RAM cache can be looked up once and reused.

Implementing sticky sessions on a load balancer does not require any changes to your application. Your sticky session configurations are limited to the tool that you choose to use to balance your site’s web traffic.

Cons:

Limits your application scalability as the load balancer cannot distribute the load evenly each time it receives a request from a client.

If the server goes down, then the session is lost. If the session has important user information, it can be lost.