JMS Load Balancing

Load balancing clusters are designed to distribute the workload across multiple nodes in the cluster. The clusters accomplish this by having one logical front-end to the cluster that distributes any requests for work to any node in the cluster. The main purpose of this type of cluster is to provide improved performance, although they often include some high-availability features.

JMS supports load balancing by allowing multiple receivers on a queue. Replication of deployed service assemblies results in multiple JMS Binding Component instances receiving from the same queue. Messages are delivered in a point-to-point fashion, with only one receiver getting one message at a time. The JMS broker balances the load by delivering messages from the queue to any available receivers on that queue. The algorithm used for load balancing depends on the JMS provider.

Load balancing is only valid if queues are used, not topics.