Optimizing Load Balancing Framework for a Distributed Local Network

Load Balancing is a critical and foundational challenge in systems and network performance, especially in resource-constrained infrastructure environments. In which it requires careful alignment between infrastructure limited resources and performance requirements. This paper presents a lightweight deployment of a locally hosted web server on a small local network using off-the shelf devices. The observations of this paper indicate effective distribution of traffic evolving through different deployment stages. One node setup was implemented to be a baseline for performance comparison. And a 2-nodes setup was built using NGINX to provide the required load balancing. Both implementations were tested using load testing tools: Locust and Siege. Results were then compared based on standardized performance metrics: scalability, response time, throughput, and server load. The 2-nodes implementation showed near-linear scalability, with doubled throughput and CPU load dropped to 45%.