BalancerX¶

BalancerX is a lightwright load balancer written in Go. It supports proxies in both HTTP and TCP, with multiple load balancing strategies, health checks -- all configurations controlled by config.yaml.

/etc/balancerx/config.yaml when installed with .deb package.

✨ Features¶

🔁 Round-robin and Random load balancing strategies
📂 YAML-based configuration for HTTP or TCP protocols
🩺 Active health checks: HTTP endpoint checks or TCP connection probes
⚡ HTTP reverse proxy using net/http/httputil
📜 Logging: at /var/log/balancerx/balancerx.log
🔧 Easily extendable with new strategies and protocol support
🚀 Health checker service (available but not yet integrated)

🚀 Quick Start¶

Installation¶

Debian Package (Recommended)¶

# Download and install
wget https://github.com/nishujangra/balancerx/releases/latest/download/balancerx_1.0.0.deb
sudo dpkg -i balancerx_1.0.0.deb

# Start the service
sudo systemctl start balancerx
sudo systemctl enable balancerx

From Source¶

git clone https://github.com/nishujangra/balancerx.git
cd balancerx
go build -o build/balancerx main.go
./build/balancerx -config=config.yaml

Basic Configuration¶

Create a config.yaml file:

port: 8080
protocol: http
strategy: round-robin # or random
backends:
  - http://localhost:9001
  - http://localhost:9002
  - http://localhost:9003
health_check:
  path: /health

📊 Performance¶

BalancerX demonstrates excellent performance characteristics:

Load Balancer	Binary Size	Memory Usage (RSS)	Package Files
BalancerX	9.4M	2,468 KB	18 files
nginx	1.3M	Not running	12 files

Key Benefits¶

Low Memory Footprint: Only ~2.5MB RAM usage
Fewer Dependencies → Leaner binary & fewer attack surfaces
Native Go HTTP → Predictable, no framework bloat
Smart Goroutine Management → Scalable concurrency without memory blowups

🔌 Supported Protocols¶

Protocol	Description
`http`	Reverse proxy for HTTP with health checks and header handling
`tcp`	Transparent forwarding of raw TCP connections with basic health checks

⚙️ Load Balancing Strategies¶

Name	Description
`round-robin`	Cycles through backends in fixed order
`random`	Randomly selects a backend per request
`least-conn`	(Planned) Chooses backend with fewest connections
`ip-hash`	(Planned) Sticky routing by client IP hash

🧪 Testing¶

HTTP Backends¶

Sample backend server using golang is provided in dummy-server/dummy-golang.go. Copy that sample backend server if you want to try BalancerX in your local-system

or You can use your own server but that server must have health check route you provided and if not provided in config.yaml then /health is the default endpoint for health check

go run dummy-golang.go 9001
go run dummy-golang.go 9002

or

# For running dummy serves from port 9000 to 9100
for i in $(seq 9000 9100); do
    go run dummy-golang.py $i &
done

# Stop running servers from port 9000 to 9100
for port in $(seq 9000 9100); do
    pid=$(lsof -t -i:$port)
    if [ -n "$pid" ]; then
        kill -9 $pid
    fi
done

TCP Backends¶

# Start TCP servers
nc -lk 6001 &
nc -lk 6002 &

# Connect via BalancerX
telnet localhost 9090

🤝 Contributing¶

Contributions and suggestions are welcome!

📜 License¶

BalancerX is developed and maintained by Nishant.