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Subrun's avatar
Subrun
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Mar 02, 2020

Load Balancing Not Happening for Pool Members of a Performance Layer VIP

I configured a Virtual Server as Layer 4 VIP with Load Balancing method configured as "Least Connections".   IP Traffic Flow is as below :   Client on Different Subnet >> 2.2....
application delivery
BIG-IP
LTM
Subrun's avatar
Subrun
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Mar 04, 2020

Screenshot you see I attached , if that Yellow Marked Option is selected then I see connections are distributed within backend servers. If that option is not selected I see 1 single connection ( TCP Connection ) to Only 1 node. Screenshot says HTTP Connection I am not sure if that means TCP Connection or HTTP Connection. Confused actually.

 

Assuming in the screenshot it meant TCP Connection , how does that work for HTTP Traffic once TCP Connection is closed. Sorry for my knowledge limitation.

Simon_Blakely's avatar
Simon_Blakely
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Mar 04, 2020

HTTP request/responses are (currently) passed over a TCP connection.

 

A HTTP client (browser) can open a TCP connection, send an HTTP request, wait for the HTTP response, and then close the TCP connection.

 

More commonly, the HTTP client will open a TCP connection, send an HTTP request, wait for the HTTP response, send another HTTP request, wait for the HTTP response, and then eventually close the TCP connection. This is called HTTP Keep-alive or HTTP persistent connection.

 

The highlighted SoapUI option Close connection after request is actually referring to closing the TCP connection after the HTTP response, disabling HTTP persistent connection.