Load Balancing (I)

Load Balancing

The steady growth of the Internet is causing many performance problems, including low response times, network congestion and disruption of services either caused by normal system overload or by cyber attacks (DDoS). The most widely used solution to minimize or solve these problems in Load Balancing.

Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster.

Load Balancing (sometimes also referred as to Network Load Balancing or Server Load Balancing) can also be described as the process of distributing service requests across a group of servers. This addresses several requirements that are becoming increasingly important in networks:

• Increased scalability: When many content-intensive applications scale beyond the point where a single server can provide adequate processing power, it is increasingly important to have the flexibility to deploy additional servers quickly and transparently to end-users;

 

• High performance: The highest performance is achieved when the processing power of servers is used intelligently. An advanced load balancing infrastructure can direct end-user service requests to the servers that are least busy and therefore capable of providing the fastest response time;

 

• High availability and disaster recovery: The third benefit of load balancing is its ability to improve application availability. If an application or server fails, load balancing can automatically redistribute end-user service requests to other servers within a server cluster or to servers in another location;

On the Internet, companies whose Web sites get a great deal of traffic usually use load balancing. When a single Web Server machine isn’t enough to handle the traffic in a Web site it’s time to look into building a Web Farm that uses multiple machines on the network acting as a single server. In a web farm, services or applications can be installed onto multiple servers that are configured to share the workload. This type of configuration is a load-balanced cluster which scales the performance of server-based programs, such as a Web server, by distributing client requests across multiple servers.

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