I've recently migrated from an old version of LVS / ldirectord (Ultra Monkey) to a new Debian install with ldirectord.

Now the amount of Active Connections is usually higher than the amount of Inactive Connections, it used to be the other way around.

Basically on the old load balancer the connections looked something like:

  -> RemoteAddress:Port           Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn
  -> 10.84.32.21:0               Masq    1      12        252
  -> 10.84.32.22:0               Masq    1      18        368

However since migrating it to the new load balancer it looks more like:

  -> RemoteAddress:Port           Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn
  -> 10.84.32.21:0               Masq    1      313        141
  -> 10.84.32.22:0               Masq    1      276        183

Old load balancer:

• Debian 3.1
• ipvsadm 1.24
• ldirectord 1.2.3

New load balancer:

• Debian 6.0.5
• ipvsadm 1.25
• ldirectord 1.0.3 (I guess the versioning system changed)

Is it because the old load balancer was running a kernel from 2005, and ldirectord from 2004, and things have simply changed in the past 7 - 8 years?

Did I miss some sysctl settings that I should be enforcing for it to behave in the same way?

Everything appears to be working fine but can anyone see an issue with this behaviour?

Thanks in advance!

Additional info: I'm using LVS in masquerading mode, the real servers have the load balancer as their gateway. The real servers are running Apache, which hasn't changed during the upgrade. The boxes themselves show roughly the same amount of Inactive Connections shown in ipvsadm.