Weighted Round-Robin Scheduling

The weighted round-robin scheduling is designed to better handle servers with different processing capacities. Each server can be assigned a weight, an integer value that indicates the processing capacity. Servers with higher weights receive new connections first than those with less weights, and servers with higher weights get more connections than those with less weights and servers with equal weights get equal connections. For example, the real servers, A, B and C, have the weights, 4, 3, 2 respectively, a good scheduling sequence will be AABABCABC in a scheduling period (mod sum(Wi)).

In the implementation of the weighted round-robin scheduling, a scheduling sequence will be generated according to the server weights after the rules of Virtual Server are modified. The network connections are directed to the different real servers based on the scheduling sequence in a round-robin manner.

The weighted round-robin scheduling is better than the round-robin scheduling, when the processing capacity of real servers are different. However, it may lead to dynamic load imbalance among the real servers if the load of the requests vary highly. In short, there is the possibility that a majority of requests requiring large responses may be directed to the same real server.

Actually, the round-robin scheduling is a special instance of the weighted round-robin scheduling, in which all the weights are equal.