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This document offers best practices as methods proven to optimize success and efficiency in accomplishing various activities, such as infrastructure building, monitoring, etc.
A best practice provides a higher-level tactical approach to optimize success and use of time. It's a technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to reliably lead to a desired result. |
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 can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both. Typically, load balancing is the main reason for computer server clustering.
Load balancing is the fine tuning of a computer system, network or disk subsystem in order to more evenly distribute the data and/or processing across available resources. For example, in clustering, load balancing might distribute the incoming transactions evenly to all servers, or it might redirect them to the next available server.
On the Internet, companies whose Web sites get a great deal of traffic usually use load balancing. For load balancing Web traffic, there are several approaches. For Web serving, one approach is to route each request in turn to a different server host address in a domain name system (DNS) table, round-robin fashion. Usually, if two servers are used to balance a work load, a third server is needed to determine which server to assign the work to.
Since load balancing requires multiple servers, it is usually combined with failover and backup services. In some approaches, the servers are distributed over different geographic locations.
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