CHEP 2024:
To address the need for high transfer throughput for projects such as the LHC experiments, including the upcoming HL-LHC, it is important to make optimal and sustainable use of our available capacity. Load balancing algorithms play a crucial role in distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers, ensuring optimal resource utilization, preventing server overload, and enhancing performance and reliability. RAL has At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), the UK's Tier-1 centre for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), we used XRootD's cluster management service component, which has an active load balancing algorithm to distribute traffic across 26 servers, but encountered its limitations when the system as a whole is under heavy load. We describe our attempted tuning of the configuration before describing a new tunable dynamic load-balancing algorithm based on a weighted random selection algorithm.
...