Load Balancer Playground
A small load balancer in front of simulated backends that slow down, fail and crash, with a live dashboard comparing random, round-robin and a scoring strategy.
What it does
A learning project. Three simulated backends have load-driven CPU, memory and latency, failure rates that climb under load, flaky health checks and the occasional crash. The balancer retries across backends, times out slow requests, and has a per-backend circuit breaker.
A browser dashboard runs all three strategies side by side and lets you change traffic, failure rates and presets from stable to chaos live, without restarting. There's a terminal view too.
The finding I didn't expect: my scoring balancer did consistently worse than round-robin and random. Traffic herded onto whichever backend looked best, it reacted to load it had caused itself, and its metrics lagged by two seconds. Power-of-two-choices is the fix I'd try next.
- +Three strategies under identical traffic
- +Circuit breakers, retries and timeouts
- +Terminal and web dashboards