Why Round-Robin Load Balancing Fails WebSocket Connections at Scale

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Round-robin load balancing, while effective for stateless HTTP traffic, is poorly suited for WebSocket connections because it distributes handshakes rather than ongoing connection load. Since WebSocket connections are persistent and can remain open for hours, round-robin routing gradually concentrates active connections on a small number of backend nodes, creating dangerous hotspots. These overloaded nodes can buckle under memory and CPU pressure, triggering cascading failures across the system. Switching to a least-connections routing strategy — where new handshakes are directed to the least-burdened server — helps distribute load more evenly. Additional pitfalls include using IP-based sticky sessions, which can pin thousands of users sharing a single IP to one node, and default idle timeouts that silently drop live WebSocket connections.

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