I've used this trick to forward to a Twisted Conch daemon running as a non-root ...

sparrish · on Aug 15, 2011

Why would you never consider it for load balancing?

adamtulinius · on Aug 15, 2011

Because first of all it's just a variation of round-robin, which doesn't take into account that different requests will take varying amounts of time.

Secondly, you can't (in an easy way) remove or add to the pool of backends.

I'm confident others will come up with more not-so-compelling reasons for using iptables for load balancing.