The "Least Connections" mechanism aims to evenly distribute the workload among the available servers by sending new requests to the server that currently has the lowest number of active connections. This approach helps balance the traffic across the servers, preventing any single server from being overwhelmed with connections while others remain underutilized.
When using the "Least Connections" algorithm, the load balancer keeps track of the number of active connections on each server. When a new request arrives, it selects the server with the fewest connections and directs the request to that server. By continuously monitoring and updating connection counts, the load balancer ensures that the workload is distributed as evenly as possible.
The advantage of the "Least Connections" mechanism is that it can dynamically adapt to fluctuations in traffic and distribute requests based on the real-time load on each server. This helps optimize resource utilization and can lead to improved performance and responsiveness for end-users.
It's worth mentioning that load balancers often offer multiple load balancing algorithms, such as Round Robin, Least Connections, Weighted Distribution, and more. The choice of algorithm depends on factors such as the specific application requirements, server capacities, and traffic patterns.