I'm not an expert on this, but I think what's costly is storing and communicating information about the load of each server a client is connected to, not the ov

I'm not an expert on this, but I think what's costly is storing and communicating information about the load of each server a client is connected to, not the overhead of TCP. I found http://liblb.com/learn.html http://liblb.com/learn.html useful for understanding how different load balancing algorithms work.