How does load balancing improve system availability and performance?
Direct Answer
This networking/system design question explores distributing traffic across multiple servers to handle scale.
Why Interviewers Ask This
E-commerce sites face massive traffic spikes; interviewers need to verify you understand scaling strategies. Load balancing prevents single points of failure and optimizes resource utilization. This question assesses your ability to design resilient, high-performance architectures.
How to Answer This Question
Define load balancing as distributing incoming requests across a pool of servers. Explain benefits like fault tolerance and reduced latency. Mention algorithms like round-robin or least connections. Discuss health checks and session persistence.
Key Points to Cover
- Traffic distribution
- Fault tolerance
- Algorithms overview
- Health monitoring
Sample Answer
Load balancing distributes network traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server becomes overwhelmed. This improves availability by rerouting traffic if a server fails and enhances performance by minimizing…
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Focusing only on hardware
- Ignoring session persistence
- Missing health check details
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