We have a site with 2 relays. Both have the same _BESRelay_Register_Affiliation_AdvertisementList settings, but one relay has over 1100 connections and the other only has 261. Is there any way to force some of the clients off the overloaded relay and on to the under utilized one?
You can follow the link below to set a client setting _Enterprise Server_ClientRegister_MaxChildCount to limit the number of clients reporting to one relay.
One relay may be “closer” via hop count than the other as well depending on your network topology
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As long as that relay has resources to spare, 1100 clients is completely fine, though if it has slower disks and slower network, then balancing it out is a good idea.
Client registrations seem to be rather sticky so you can use the MaxChildCount to temporarily drain the number of clients down on one particular relay. You could try removing the setting after the fact to see if things stay balanced.
Generally when you stand up a brand new relay, clients will continue to use the existing ones and it takes time for them to naturally move around.
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Just to verify… is there a space between _Enterprise and Server?
Keep in mind setting the maxchildcount could cause that relay to refuse additional clients if the other relay goes down. You may want the relay to accept more clients for failover purposes.
We set a unique advertisement list for each relay as well as a shared one for failover, example:
Relay1 Advertisementlist: LocactionA-0;LocationA
Relay2 Advertisementlist: LocationA-1;LocationA
Then the clients are assigned a seeklist based on their computer ID, this effectively splits the load evenly between the two relays. They also have the shared seeklist as the 2nd choice, this way if their primary relay is down they will do an auto select on the other relays at the location. example:
Client seeklist = LocationA-{computer id as integer mod 2};LocationA
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