Deadline pressure
Timeouts turn otherwise valid decisions into lost opportunities. Infrastructure overhead competes directly with bidder work.
OpenRTB load balancer for ad tech
OpenRTB load balancing at massive scale.
XLB gives bidders, exchanges, SSPs, and ad-serving APIs the highest-performance L4 load-balancing path with drastically lower operating cost and no HAProxy or NGINX tuning.
WorkloadsOpenRTB + ad-serving APIs
TrafficMillions of requests per second
OperationAutomatic backends + monitoring
Business resultLower infrastructure cost
The infrastructure problem
Ad-tech traffic punishes expensive defaults.
Billions of time-sensitive requests make usage-based AWS NLB pricing expensive. HAProxy and NGINX avoid that traffic fee, but their capacity still has to be sized, tuned, monitored, and supported.
XLB was built for this exact shape of problem: enormous TCP volume, hard response deadlines, and a simple Layer 4 job that should not dominate the cloud bill or the infrastructure roadmap.
Traffic bursts
Supply is not uniform. The ingress layer must absorb sudden changes without resizing and retuning HAProxy or NGINX for every peak.
Cost at volume
At sustained request rates, connection handling and per-packet userspace work become infrastructure capacity questions.
Deployment portability
Ad platforms often span colocation, bare metal, and multiple clouds. The L4 behavior should travel with the workload.
Where XLB fits
A direct path to every bidder.
XLB selects a healthy application server and forwards the existing TCP connection directly. TLS and request processing stay on the bidder servers exactly where they run today.
Understand the data planeSupplyExchange / SSPBid request over HTTPS
IPv4/TCP
Layer 4XLBselect · NAT · forward
same flow
Bidder pool
01TLS + auction logic
02TLS + auction logic
03TLS + auction logic
Performance under load
Lower latency. More stable at scale.
XLB does less work for every packet. Kernel processing, zero userspace payload copies, and one end-to-end connection reduce latency and keep performance consistent as traffic rises.
Kernel fast path01
Backend selection and packet forwarding run in the kernel without scheduling a userspace proxy for every payload.
Zero payload copies02
XLB forwards the original application data without receiving, buffering, copying, and resending it through a proxy process.
Completely tuning free03
No worker, thread, buffer, socket, or connection-profile tuning. Point XLB at the backends and run it.
Real questions
What ad-tech teams ask before replacing a load balancer.
How much can XLB save compared with AWS NLB?
XLB has no traffic-based fee and runs on infrastructure you control. At high scale, it typically runs at around 20% of the cost of an equivalent managed NLB deployment in practice. The exact result varies with traffic and infrastructure.
Why is XLB faster than HAProxy or NGINX?
HAProxy and NGINX receive, buffer, copy, and resend application data in both directions while maintaining two connections. XLB selects a backend and routes packets without copying the payload into a proxy process. That leaves more CPU available to move traffic.
Does XLB require VIPs or a separate control plane?
No. XLB can use the host’s existing IP and automatically select the relevant interface. It does not require a separate VIP cluster, BGP setup, keepalived deployment, or cloud load-balancer controller.
What happens when bidder Pods scale or restart?
XLB watches the configured Kubernetes Service. Ready Pods are added automatically. Unready or terminating Pods stop receiving new connections. Existing connections stay assigned to their original backend while their flow state exists.
Where do TLS and HTTP processing happen?
Your application servers keep TLS, HTTP, authentication, and request processing exactly where they run today. XLB forwards the TCP connection directly to the selected server.
Compare it with what you run today
Cut the load-balancing bill and the fleet.
Bring your AWS bill or HAProxy/NGINX topology. We’ll show what the same job looks like with XLB.