Load balancer, up close

Watch a load balancer share the work.

Requests queue behind one server, then a balancer deals them across three, and routes around a failure. Drag through it, slow it down.

A simulation, not production traffic. Every pass plays the same fixed arrivals, so you can scrub back and forth.

Drag the timeline · play to watch

The finished simulation: requests spread across three servers

1/6One client, one server

    0.0s

    What it's for

    Good to know

    Round-robin is simple but blind: it treats a fast server and a slow one as equal. Least-connections watches how busy each server actually is, which is why the fast server ends up doing more of the work here. Real balancers also terminate TLS, pin sessions and retry failed requests; none of that is shown.

    How it works, step by step

      Before you rely on it

      This is a teaching model. Arrivals are fixed, service times are averages, and there is no network jitter, no retries and no consistent hashing. For real designs, read the current NGINX, HAProxy or your cloud balancer's documentation.