Effect of Database Server Arrangement to the Performance of Load Balancing Systems

Load balancing architectures can be used to solve overloading problems on web sites. Recently, most of the contents of web pages are retrieved from a database. Thus, the arrangement of the database server in a load balancing architecture is one of the most important factors that impact the overall performance. In this paper, we analyze the performance of load balancing architectures with a centralized database arrangement and a decentralized database arrangement. With a series of experiments, we can find the most appropriate arrangement for the database server. The experimental results show that when the number of client requests is small, using the decentralized arrangement results in a lower average response time because no network communications are needed. But when the number of client requests is large, using the centralized database architecture can achieve higher performance because the database server can share the load of web servers.