Distributing Transactional Load

When considering transactional load alone, the most common techniques of load balancing involve dividing the HTTP requests across multiple Web servers. Thus, each Web server will only serve a fraction of the total requests, and the overall capacity of your application is multiplied (ignoring load balancing overhead) by the number of Web server nodes in your environment. I will discuss two very different methods of achieving transactional load balancing—DNS round robin and hardware load balancers.

Load Balancing with DNS

Sometimes referred to as the poor man’s load balancing solution, DNS round robin can be an effective means of distributing transactional load. In Chapter 2, “The Internet and the World Wide Web,” ...

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