Operations FAQ

Do YugabyteDB clusters need an external load balancer?

For YSQL, an external load balancer is recommended, but note the following:

  • If you use the YugabyteDB JDBC driver (beta) with an application regularly opens and closes connections to clients, then the YugabyteDB JDBC driver effectively provides basic load balancing by randomly using connections to your nodes.
  • If you use the Spring Data Yugabyte driver (beta) with your Spring application, then the underlying YugabyteDB JDBC driver provides basic load balancing.
  • If you have an application that is not in the same Kubernetes cluster, then you should use an external load balancing system.

For YCQL, YugabyteDB provides automatic load balancing.

Can write ahead log (WAL) files be cleaned up or reduced in size?

For most YugabyteDB deployments, you should not need to adjust the configuration options for the write ahead log (WAL). While your data size is small and growing, the WAL files may seem to be much larger, but over time, the WAL files should reach their steady state while the data size continues to grow and become larger than the WAL files.

WAL files are per tablet and the retention policy is managed by the following two yb-tserver configuration options:

Also, the following yb-tserver configuration option is a factor in the size of each WAL file before it is rolled into a new one: