During the Covid pandemic and social distancing, entertainment venues, lotteries, and betting activities were temporarily suspended. People seemed to have more time to pay attention to the stock market. The trading volume surged dramatically, and with the influx of capital from new (F0) investors, the trading systems of many securities companies—especially those in the top 10—frequently encountered issues such as lag, freezing, and trading interruptions. 

Many partners contacted InnoTech for consulting solutions to improve system capacity. One of the solutions InnoTech recommended was: “ Load balancing should be implemented as soon as possible.”

So, what exactly is load balancing?

Load balancing is a method of distributing workloads across multiple computers or clusters of servers to optimize resource usage, maximize bandwidth, reduce response time, and avoid overloading a single server.

Load balancing helps a system in the following ways:

Improves responsiveness and prevents server overload, ensuring flexibility and scalability for the system.

Enhances reliability and fault tolerance. Using load balancing increases the system’s HA (High Availability) while ensuring that users are not interrupted when a service point encounters a failure (Resilience).

Improves system security. Service requests sent to the system are processed by the load balancer before being forwarded to internal servers, and the same applies to the response process. This means users cannot know the exact internal servers or load distribution methods being used. This approach prevents direct user access to internal servers, hides internal network structures, and helps prevent cyberattacks or unauthorized access to unrelated services running on other ports.

Load Balancing Algorithms

There are many load balancing algorithms, but the most common ones include:

Round Robin Algorithm
This is a rotation-based algorithm where servers are treated equally and arranged in a circular order. Service requests are sent to each server sequentially in turn.

Weighted Round Robin Algorithm
This is similar to the Round Robin algorithm, but allows you to configure certain servers to receive more frequent requests based on their assigned weight.

Least Connection Algorithm
This algorithm distributes load based on the number of active connections, automatically choosing the server with the fewest active connections.

Weighted Least Connection Algorithm
Similar to the Least Connection algorithm, but allows you to assign higher priority (weight) to specific servers within the cluster.

Least Response Time Algorithm
This algorithm chooses the server with the shortest response time to handle requests, improving overall efficiency.

In addition, there are many other load balancing algorithms depending on the software or hardware solution being used.

Load balancing should be implemented as early as possible, especially for high-traffic systems such as securities trading platforms. InnoTech has extensive experience in consulting and successfully deploying load balancing solutions for partners and clients with high-intensity trading systems, helping them prepare for the upcoming market surge.