Load Balancing & WAN Optimization

Distributing processing and communications activity evenly across a computer network so that no single device is overwhelmed. Load balancing is especially important for networks where it's difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Busy Web sites typically employ two or more Web servers in a load balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Load balancing can also refer to the communications channels themselves.

Load balancing Process

Whether load balancing is done on a local network or a large Web server, it requires hardware or software that divides incoming traffic among the available servers. Networks that receive high amounts of traffic may even have one or more servers dedicated to balancing the load among the other servers and devices in the network. These servers are often called (not surprisingly) load balancers.