Comparison of load balancing methods for Raspberry-Pi Clustered Embedded Web Servers

This paper discusses load balancing methods available in the Apache2 server. The Apache2 server runs on Raspberry-Pi2 model B+ clustered web server which consisting of three Raspberry-Pi boards one functions as the load balancer and two as worker nodes. As a part of this research, we developed a web application called the “Student Information System (SIS)” and it runs on the web server. Siege software has been used to generate artificial traffic and to measure parameters such as throughput, transactions, transaction rate, concurrency, response time and data transferred. Results were analyzed by modeling the linear and nonlinear models for each and every parameter against the number of users. We focus on an experimental analysis of the performance under four load balancing methods available in Apache2 server. We study the performance of the algorithms through a simulation to evaluate their performance under different conditions. The results of our study are reported in the paper.