Improving Performance Through Load Balancing

Across the web, sites experience a wide range of network traffic requirements. Sites such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft obviously experience tens of millions of user hits per day. To handle such web requests, the sites use a technique known as load balancing, as shown in FIGURE 4-5, to share the requests across multiple servers.

A load balancing server is between systems on one side and a cloud consisting of server 1 and server 2 on the other side. Requests 1, 2, 3, and 4 from the systems lead to the load balancing server. Requests 1 and 3 are directed toward server 1 and requests 2 and 4 are directed toward server 2 from the load balancing server.

FIGURE 4-5 Load balancing uses a server to route traffic to multiple servers that, in turn, share the workload.

For a simple webpage, a client’s web browser requests an HTML page and then the related graphics, CSS, and JavaScript files from the web server, as shown ...

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