Why is it difficult to achieve true load balancing (as opposed to load sharing) in most networks?

Question

Why is it difficult to achieve true load balancing (as opposed to load sharing) in
most networks?

Answer 1

I'm not sure of an exact answer, but it would be hard to tell the routers or switches to say "you take X amount of data, i take X amount of data". True load balancing would equal the load 50/50 on each device. Where as load sharing is more like "both split it, but if one takes more it's ok".



You could look at load sharing as one device does the vast majority of the work, but if it starts to become congested, it will pass some of the load to the other device until it can get caught up.



This is really brief and not very in-depth, but it covers the basic idea of it.

Answer 2

Load balancing requires "smarts" to monitor all traffic, from all machines, and then throttle those that are excessive, and give the excess to others that need it.

Unless a router/firewall knows all the MAC addresses, all the IP addresses, it is hard to control everything. Also, load balancing requires some buffering (ie ram memory), which home routers do not have a lot of... Load balancing is also CPU intensive.

Answer 3

It's actually interesting