How do I troubleshoot Classic Load Balancer capacity issues in ELB?

Short description

The Classic Load Balancer metric SurgeQueueLength measures the total number of requests queued by your Classic Load Balancer. An increased maximum statistic for SurgeQueueLength indicates that backend systems can't process incoming requests as fast as the requests are received. Possible reasons for a high SurgeQueueLength metric include:

• Overloaded Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances behind the Classic Load Balancer that are unable to process all incoming requests
• Application dependency issues due to external resource performance issues
• Maximum allowable connection limits for instances

When requests exceed the maximum SurgeQueueLength, the SpilloverCount metric starts to measure rejected requests. The maximum SurgeQueueLength is 1024.

Resolution

• Configure Auto Scaling groups with your Classic Load Balancer to scale your instances based on demand.
• Configure CloudWatch to monitor your Classic Load Balancer.
• Turn on detailed monitoring for instances behind your Classic Load Balancer to monitor the CPUUtilization metric. You can also get statistics for a specific instance. If CPU utilization spikes, your instances are too busy processing existing requests to accept new requests. Consider scaling out your instances or scaling up to an instance type with more processing power.
• Troubleshoot HTTP errors for your Classic Load Balancer. Load-related issues typically return 503 or 504 HTTP errors.
• If your Amazon EC2 instances run Apache, then see How do I tune Apache web server's memory allocation to prevent out of memory errors in an EC2 Linux instance?
• For performance issues related to normal traffic increases over time, consider increasing your instance capacity.

Related information

CloudWatch metrics for your Classic Load Balancer