A Load Balancer is a tool used to sort incoming requests across Virtual Machines and Bare Metal servers to improve your infrastructure’s fault tolerance.
Gcore Load Balancers come with various configuration options to fit different network requirements. We’ve also conducted multiple performance tests on available flavors to help you make an informed decision and select the most effective solution for your infrastructure.
Our Load Balancers also support long (keepalive) connections through Server-Sent Events (SSE), Long polling, and WebSockets. To keep the connections consistently stable, you need to adjust the data timeout to the appropriate values based on your application’s requirements.
We’ve tested our Load Balancers to determine the performance of different flavors.
For each flavor, we’ve deployed the client in multithreading mode with 36 concurrent threads and 400 connections over the test duration of 30 seconds.
The results show:
-
Throughput : The number of requests per second (RPS) a Load Balancer can handle under a number of simultaneous users’ requests.
-
Latency : Response times for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic across different Load Balancer flavors.
| Flavor | HTTP | HTTPS | | |
|---|
| Throughput | Latency (ms) | Throughput | Latency (ms) | |
| 1 vCPU - 2 GiB | 21k | 4 | 20k | 20 |
| 2 vCPU - 4 GiB | 45k | 3 | 34k | 12 |
| 4 vCPU - 8 GiB | 91k | 5 | 51k | 8 |
| 8 vCPU - 16 GiB | 142k | 3 | 117k | 4 |
Network optimised
For workloads that require high network throughput, network optimised load balancers (lb2 flavors) provide guaranteed bandwidth through QoS policies: up to 10 Gbps.
These load balancers run on dedicated infrastructure with hardware-level network acceleration, delivering reduced CPU overhead and higher packet rates while maintaining full security feature support. They are suitable for high-throughput services handling large volumes of concurrent connections or high-bandwidth traffic, and for services requiring consistent low-latency packet delivery.
| Flavor | vCPU | RAM (GiB) | Network bandwidth |
|---|
| lb2-2-2 | 2 | 2 | 1.5 Gbps |
| lb2-4-4 | 4 | 4 | 5 Gbps |
| lb2-8-8 | 8 | 8 | 10 Gbps |
| lb2-16-16 | 16 | 16 | 10 Gbps |
InfoThe lb2-2-2 flavor provides baseline 1.5 Gbps bandwidth while retaining the low-latency benefits of network optimised infrastructure.
