Load Balancing (II)

Client Based Load Balancing

It might be easier to make the client code and resources highly available and scalable than to do so for the servers; serving non-dynamic content requires fewer server resources. Before going into the details, let us consider a desktop application that needs to connect to servers on the internet to retrieve data. If our theoretical desktop application generates more requests to the remote server than it can handle, we will need a load balancing solution.

Instead of letting the client know of only one server from which to retrieve data, we can provide many servers—s1.mywebsite.com, s2.mywebsite.com, and so on. The desktop client randomly selects a server and attempts to retrieve data. If the server is not available, or does not respond in a preset time period, the client can select another server until the data is retrieved. Unlike web applications—which store the client code (JavaScript code or Flash SWF) on the same server that provides data and resource—the desktop client is independent of the server and able to load balance servers from the client side to achieve scalability for the application.


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