Pgpool2 doesn't use the slave for load balancing

Question

I've enabled streaming replication in my postgres 9.5.10 installed from ubuntu xenial repo. I want to enable load balance for pgpool-2 (3.7.0 amefuriboshi) installed from sources. So I have this pgpool.conf: https://pastebin.com/qWWgejQN

As you can see, I set both nodes, turned off replication, turned on master/slave mode and set it to stream. And also I enabled memcached caching.

Now I have very big problem that pgpool doesn't want to use slave for balancing:

postgres=# show pool_nodes;
 node_id |    hostname    | port | status | lb_weight |  role   | select_cnt | load_balance_node | replication_delay 
---------+----------------+------+--------+-----------+---------+------------+-------------------+-------------------
 0       | localhost      | 5433 | up     | 0.500000  | primary | 0          | true              | 0
 1       | host2          | 5433 | unused | 0.500000  | standby | 0          | false             | 0
(2 rows)

What am I do wrong?

Answer 1

I found this page http://lists.pgfoundry.org/pipermail/pgpool-general/2010-May/002711.html

They say that I need to remove file pgpool_status. I did it and pgpool works now with two nodes! Seems the file was created when I had not the second node and after pgpool just trusted this file all time. So removing this file solved the problem.

Answer 2

Answer to a similar question : http://www.sraoss.jp/pipermail/pgpool-general/2017-May/005504.html

The relevant answer being:

Pgpool-II chooses one of DB nodes with a probability of the weight parameter when a client connects to Pgpool-II. "load_balance_node" is true if it is chosen, and false if it is not chosen. The decision is not relevant whether it is a master or a slave.