What is the purpose of weighting?

Weighting in load balancing distributes traffic among servers based on their assigned weights, reflecting their capacity or performance. Higher-weighted servers receive more traffic, optimizing resource utilization and ensuring efficient handling of requests.

So let us suppose we are load balancing three servers.

• Server 1 is a hardware server with a Dual quad-core Xeon CPU, 128GB RAM, and 10 Gigabit NIC.
• Server 2 is a hardware server with a Single quad-core Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM, and quad Gigabit NICs bonded.
• Server 3 is a Virtual Machine with 4 vCPU, 16GB RAM, and a Gigabit NIC.

Server 1 is the most powerful and capable of handling the most traffic and processing. This is followed by Server 2 and, finally, Server 3.

In such a situation we would place the highest weighting on Server 1, with Server 2 following and Server 3 last with the lowest weighting. See the image below as an example. The actual figures will be different to the one in the image.