Concise Guide to DNS and BIND, The

DNS Round Robin and Load Distribution

In these days of exponential growth of Internet users any moderately successful Web site will receive more traffic than one machine can handle. There are many ways to cope with this, and the most robust use special hardware to do load distribution among multiple servers. There is a quite good, very cheap, and somewhat un-robust way to do it with DNS as well: DNS round robin. This was first implemented by a special load distributing DNS server implementation, but was also implemented in a late version of BIND 4. The trick is simply this: When a service is served by many servers all containing the same content simply enter multiple A records for the domain name for the service. This trick works quite well. ...