> (using no pipelining or multiplexing), "Doctor it hurts when I hit myself" > the number of simultaenous outgoing http connections to backend systems is at l

> (using no pipelining or multiplexing), "Doctor it hurts when I hit myself" > the number of simultaenous outgoing http connections to backend systems is at least the number of simulatenous open incoming http connections No it isn't. You establish a pool of long lived connections per backend. The load balancer should be coalescing in flight requests. At that traffic volume you should also be doing basic in-memory caches to sink things like favicon requests. I am not going to respond further as this chain is getting quite off topic. There are plenty of good resources available from relevant Google searches, but if you really still have questions about how load balancers work my email is in my profile.