How do load-balanced forwarders select receivers?

[isaacvb]

The Splunk docs for Forwarder load-balancing say that a forwarder randomly chooses between the different available receivers when it has to change where it's sending data.

What are the specifics of this change?
Can the forwarder select the same indexer again?
Does the forwarder guarantee cycling through all the indexers by reducing its available switching pool each time until it's sent data to all of them, or is it possible for a forwarder to switch between only a few indexers out of the ones available e.g. A B A B out of A B C?

My basic guess was that it just picked any indexer that wasn't the one it was sending to at that moment, but it didn't seem that clear.

[renjith_nair · Accepted solution]

Normally forwarder switches at every regular interval, say 30 mins or if the indexer goes down
The selection of receiver from the group is random
If you want to select only two out of three, you can configure that.

Detailed doc available here : http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.2.0/Forwarding/Setuploadbalancingd

On top of this, If you have a specific issue, then somebody might be able to help you