A Lock-Free Solution for Load Balancing in Multi-Core Environment

Load balancing device is an important part of cloud platform. One of the most common applications of load balancing is to provide a single powerful virtual machine from multiple servers. In multi-core environment, the load balancing device can run multiple physically parallel load-balancing processes to increase overall performance. An important issue when operating a load-balanced service is how to send all requests in a user session consistently to the same backend server, i.e. session maintaining. Most of multiprocessing load balancing solutions use shared memory and lock when manage session. By modifying Linux kernel, we avoid using shared memory and implement a lock-free multiprocessing load balancing solution.