From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 20:12:01 GMT-3
At 10:57 PM +0100 5/25/04, Richard Dumoulin wrote:
>Strangely (at least to me), although it is called balancing protocol, in the
>text they only talk about load sharing the traffic,
>http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios122/122newft/122
>t/122t15/ft_glbp.htm
><http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios122/122newft/12
>2t/122t15/ft_glbp.htm> .
>
>I have never understood the difference between load sharing and load
>balancing !?!? Is the second term a particular case of the first one ?
While the two are used interchangeably, I consider load balancing a
special case of load sharing. Load balancing implies the most
symmetrical possible sharing, although you can really only speak of
balance in one, or a few, parameters. For example, per-packet load
sharing does balance perfectly, with respect to bandwidth, if and
only if you are sending equal-length packets to a single destination.
Even if you are balancing bandwidth, you may be quite asymmetrical
with respect to such a thing as out-of-order packets. Per-flow
sharing will be better with respect to packet ordering, but if
several large flows associate with the same interface, it may be less
balanced with respect to bandwidth.
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