An organization operates three Linux-based application servers behind a hardware load balancer. Two of the servers are identical 8-core hosts with 32 GB of RAM, while the third offers 16 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM. Traffic is currently distributed with a simple round-robin policy, and administrators notice that the higher-capacity server remains under-utilized while the smaller nodes approach 100 % CPU. Without adding new hardware or rewriting the application, which load-balancing method would BEST ensure that the larger server receives a proportionally greater share of incoming requests?
Weighted round robin assigns a larger weight to nodes that have more processing capacity, causing the load balancer to forward a correspondingly higher number of connections to the higher-capacity server. This corrects the imbalance seen with standard round robin, which treats every backend equally regardless of resources.
Least-connections uses real-time session counts, which can still favor a lightly loaded small server and does not inherently account for hardware differences.
Most-recently-used strives to reuse an existing running instance to minimize startup overhead and is not intended to apportion traffic by capacity.
Source-IP hashing creates sticky sessions by consistently sending each client address to the same node; it also ignores relative server performance and would not guarantee greater utilization of the larger system.
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