LOAD BALANCING IN INTERNET:
In networking, load balancing is a technique to distribute workload evenly across two or more computers,network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device.
One of the most common applications of load balancing is to provide a single internet service from multiple servers, sometimes known as a server form. Commonly, load-balanced systems include popular web sites, large internet relay chat networks, high-bandwidth File Transfer protocal sites, Network News Transfer Protocal(NNTP) servers and Domain name system (DNS) servers.
For Internet services, the load balancer is usually a software program that is listening on the port where external clients connect to access services. The load balancer forwards requests to one of the "backend" servers, which usually replies to the load balancer. This allows the load balancer to reply to the client without the client ever knowing about the internal separation of functions. It also prevents clients from contacting backend servers directly, which may have security benefits by hiding the structure of the internal network and preventing attacks on the kernel's network stack or unrelated services running on other ports.
Some load balancers provide a mechanism for doing something special in the event that all backend servers are unavailable. This might include forwarding to a backup load balancer, or displaying a message regarding the outage.
An alternate method of load balancing, which does not necessarily require a dedicated software or hardware node, is called round robin DNS. In this technique, multiple IP addresses are associated with a single domain name (e.g. www.example.org); clients themselves are expected to choose which server to connect to. Unlike the use of a dedicated load balancer, this technique exposes to clients the existence of multiple backend servers. The technique has other advantages and disadvantages, depending on the degree of control over the DNS server and the granularity of load balancing desired.
Another technique for load-balancing using DNS, which is far more intelligent than the simple "round robin", is to delegate www.example.org as a sub-domain whose zone will be served out by each of the same servers that are serving the web site. This technique works particularly well where individual servers are spread around the Internet.
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