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load balancing
Last modified: Tuesday, July 06, 2004
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.
Distributed Computing: An Overview Online tutorial that describes the complex concepts of parallel and distrubuted computer architecture.
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