Load Balancer Simulation

This project simulates a simple load balancer distributing Requests to WebServer instances. The simulation runs in discrete integer cycles and supports dynamic scaling of servers based on queue depth.

Directory layout

• include/ — public headers (request.h, webserver.h, loadbalancer.h)
• src/ — implementation sources and main.cpp
• Makefile — build helper
• Doxyfile — minimal configuration for generating HTML docs

Build

Requires a C++17 compiler. From project root:

make

Run

./lb_sim
# then enter: <initial_servers> <duration_in_cycles>

Examples

Run with 3 servers for 100 cycles:

printf "3
100
" | ./lb_sim

Generate documentation

Install Doxygen (macOS Homebrew):

brew install doxygen
doxygen Doxyfile

The HTML docs will be in docs/html/index.html.

Notes

• The simulation logs assignments, completions, scaling events, and per-cycle statuses to stdout. Redirect to a file to capture long runs.
• Adjust service/arrival parameters in src/loadbalancer.cpp for different workloads and to experiment with scaling thresholds.

Smoke test

Run the included smoke script after building to verify a short run:

make
bash tools/run_smoke.sh

Publishing docs

Generated Doxygen HTML is currently in docs/html. Instead of committing generated files to the repository, use the GitHub Action Publish Doxygen (.github/workflows/publish_docs.yml) to build and publish docs to the gh-pages branch. Run it from the Actions tab or via workflow_dispatch.

Load Balancer Simulation

This project simulates a simple load balancer distributing Requests to WebServer instances. The simulation runs in discrete integer cycles and supports dynamic scaling of servers based on queue depth.

Directory layout

• include/ — public headers (request.h, webserver.h, loadbalancer.h)
• src/ — implementation sources and main.cpp
• Makefile — build helper
• Doxyfile — minimal configuration for generating HTML docs

Build

Requires a C++17 compiler. From project root:

make

Run

./lb_sim
# then enter: <initial_servers> <duration_in_cycles>

Examples

Run with 3 servers for 100 cycles:

printf "3
100
" | ./lb_sim

Generate documentation

Install Doxygen (macOS Homebrew):

brew install doxygen
doxygen Doxyfile

The HTML docs will be in docs/html/index.html.

Notes

• The simulation logs assignments, completions, scaling events, and per-cycle statuses to stdout. Redirect to a file to capture long runs.
• Adjust service/arrival parameters in src/loadbalancer.cpp for different workloads and to experiment with scaling thresholds.