It seems we might mean different things by the term "load balancing" and I probably could have been clearer about my use of the term. My apologies. Also, the true experts are of course the people on the ORB team. I hope they will add their comments to this thread. Until then, I will try to help clarify what I meant.
The intent of the load balancing implementation, as I understand the thinking behind it and as detailed in the documentation, is to share the load of [b]multiple[/b] clients over the available server instances. With a large number of clients, each sending its messages to its assigned primary instance and with different clients assigned to different primary instances, the total load would be spread over the available servers.
This is in contrast to spreading the load from a [b]single[/b] client over all the server instances, message-by-message. Does the user actually want multiple messages from the [b]same[/b] client to go to different instances?
If load balancing worked that way - which is what the user expected if I understand correctly - then all of the instances would need to be able to share all clients' context, potentially from one message to the next, and this would add significant overhead to the system.
About whether the load balancing is or is not configurable... As I understand it, the configuration steps described in the documentation should also apply in this user's case. I assume that the user added the relevant GlassFish JARs to the Java client's class path in order for the GlassFish initial context factory to be found. If so, then the client should be using the GlassFish ORB and the configuration steps described in the documentation should work. But I have not had occasion to try that myself in a long time so I might be wrong about that. Further, perhaps I have misunderstood exactly the environment the user has set up for the client.
(And no, I do not think Sun engineers are naive about people using Java clients vs. Java EE app clients. As you point out, users are encouraged to write and deploy Java EE app clients, for several reasons. The (somewhat) simpler set-up for RMI/IIOP is one reason, but only one.)
Does this help?
- Tim
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