Verifying that load balancing really works

Server NGINX
1

Hi,

how can I verify that load balancing really works? I have 2 servers with
nginx, one of them functions as a LoadBalancer and redirects requests
either on itself or on the other server(by default round-robin). When I
look on the traffic using jnettop it looks like both servers are
loaded(while the LB is loaded more), but if I check traffic statistics
with my server provider I see that the LB server shows ca. 233Gb while
the other server only 0.012Gb in the same period. What is the rigth way
to verify it?

Thank you.

2

You can tweak the access log entries with log_format
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_log_module.html#log_format to
include the upstream server, so you will know which upstream(s) each
request got served by.

As a manual, simple, test case, I would create a specific, testing
location
on each of the upstream serving information uniquely identifying them.
See
the return
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_rewrite_module.html#return
directive to simply send some basic HTTP codes and attached messages.
Refreshing your browser (or using an automated crawler hitting your
front-end for testing purpose) will give you those answers to check how
requests are being balanced.

B. R.