Least-Connection Scheduling

The least-connection scheduling algorithm directs network connections to the server with the least number of established connections. This is one of the dynamic scheduling algorithms; because it needs to count live connections for each server dynamically. For a Virtual Server that is managing a collection of servers with similar performance, least-connection scheduling is good to smooth distribution when the load of requests vary a lot. Virtual Server will direct requests to the real server with the fewest active connections.

At a first glance it might seem that least-connection scheduling can also perform well even when there are servers of various processing capacities, because the faster server will get more network connections. In fact, it cannot perform very well because of the TCP's TIME_WAIT state. The TCP's TIME_WAIT is usually 2 minutes, during this 2 minutes a busy web site often receives thousands of connections, for example, the server A is twice as powerful as the server B, the server A is processing thousands of requests and keeping them in the TCP's TIME_WAIT state, but server B is crawling to get its thousands of connections finished. So, the least-connection scheduling cannot get load well balanced among servers with various processing capacities.