To access the Check Parameters screen, go to Rules & Checking > Check Parameters in the main menu of the LoadMaster WUI. These parameters are global and apply across all health checks on all Virtual Services.

The LoadMaster utilizes Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 health checks to monitor the availability of the Real Servers and the Virtual Services.

Check Interval(seconds)

This field specifies the number of seconds that will pass between consecutive health check attempts and defines the length of the ‘health check cycle’.

The recommended value is 9 seconds. The minimum value for the Check Interval is Connect Timeout * Retry Count + 1, i.e. (4*2) + 1 = 9.

Connect Timeout (seconds)

This is the allowed maximum wait time for a connection to be established and for the receipt of a reply to a health check. If no reply is received before the timeout expires, then the connection is re-attempted as long as the Retry Count has not been reached. If any HTTP response is received in response to the health check, then no retries are attempted in the current health check cycle. The recommended value is 4 seconds. If spurious timeouts are observed for health checks, this number may need to increase.

Retry Count

This specifies the number of times the health check will be re-attempted if the timeout above is reached before receiving a response. To override the global retry count value, you can select any other value from the drop-down list. The retry count does not apply if any response is received in response to the health check. If, for example, either a 200 or a 404 response is received, then no retries are attempted in the current cycle.

In LoadMaster firmware version 7.2.52, the check Interval, Timeout, and Retry Count settings can be configured on each Virtual Service. Previously, these were just global settings.