Why such difference response times between Load Balancer and HAProxy?

April 6, 2018 793 views
Load Balancing DigitalOcean High Availability Ubuntu 16.04
goldfire
By:
goldfire

Why is there seemingly such a big difference in response times between DigitalOcean's Load Balancer (which as I gather uses HAProxy) and a $5 droplet with HAProxy installed? I ran several load tests on each pointing to the same thing and got these results:

Load Balancer: https://i.imgur.com/Ij2s6IW.jpg
HAProxy: https://i.imgur.com/kLgJWeo.jpg

Over a number of tests, the average response time was roughly the same around 775ms for Load Balancer and around 450ms for HAProxy. Is Load Balancer using an old version of HAProxy, on shared hosts or something else?

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1 Answer
tylerdo MOD April 9, 2018
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

I'm the product manager for Load Balancers. Some of the parameters are not entirely clear or unknown (ie, the configuration of your HAProxy setup) , but there are some factors that could cause a discrepancy.

For example, if you are using the public static IP rather than a Floating IP, this could cause an additional latency, similar to what you are seeing, for each response since the LB product makes use of Floating IPs.

I should note that we are soon launching an update for Load Balancers which will include a performance increase, in addition to some new features. Be on the lookout for this!

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