Application Load Balancer Announces Slow Start Support for its Load Balancing Algorithm

Posted on: May 24, 2018

Application Load Balancers now support a slow start mode that allows you to add new targets without overwhelming them with a flood of requests. With the slow start mode, targets warm up before accepting their fair share of requests based on a ramp-up period that you specify.

Slow start is very useful for applications that depend on cache and need a warm-up period before being able to respond to requests with optimal performance.

Slow start mode can be enabled by target group and can be configured for a duration of 30 seconds to 15 minutes. The load balancer linearly increases the number of requests sent to a new target in a target group up to its fair share during the slow start ramp-up window.

Slow start is available today for all existing and new Application Load Balancers in all AWS public regions. You can get started using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDK. To learn more, see slow start mode.