title: Can application sessions share F5 load balancer connections?
body: <p>I understand that two sessions cannot use a connection at the exact same time. But I had thought it was possible for multiple sessions to share the same connection or pipe, similar in principle to a threaded application, where processing of execution is time-sliced.</p>
  
  <p>The reason I bring this up is I'm somewhat perplexed by how the F5 load balancer manages connections, in relation to application sessions. I have a web server which connects to the F5, which load balances 2 application servers:</p>
  
  <p>Client (i.e. laptop) --> Web Server --> F5 Load balancer for app servers --> (app server 1, app server 2)</p>
  
  <p>I was looking at the number of connections on the F5 load balancer the other day and it showed 7 connections to app server 1 and 3 connections to app server 2; 10 total connections. But the actual application had hundreds of sessions. How could this be? If there are 1000 sessions, let's say, that averages out to 1 connection per 100 sessions. Something doesn't add up here, I'm thinking.</p>
  
  <p>Can and does the F5 load balancer distinguish between inbound connections and outbound connections? If so, how can I see both inbound and outbound connection?  I'm thinking that, perhaps, there are 10 inbound connections from the web server to the load balancer and 1000 outbound connections (because 1000 sessions) to the app servers.</p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking it should be possible to queue or share multiple sessions per connections but maybe that's not how it works, particularly with load balancers. Any help making sense of all of this would be most appreciated. Thank you.</p>