Debug and Improve a Load Balancer

You have been asked to debug and then extend a software load balancer that sits in front of a pool of application servers. The work has two halves: first find out why the proxy stops serving traffic and then why one server drags down overall latency; after that, add failure containment and replace the plain round-robin selector with a latency-aware one. Unless your questions establish otherwise, assume a single balancer process for the exercise, and say out loud which facts…