Introduction Web server clustering is an attractive approach to achieving scalability, load balancing, and high availability for Web services.
Request dispatching mechanism is at the heart of any server clustering techniques.
Figure 1 gives an overview of various request dispatching mechanisms that can be implemented at different layers. First, a Web client specifies a service name . The name can be translated by a Java applet into one or more URLs, each containing a particular host name. Once an IP address is selected, the client's request can reach one of the server-side machines, either a router or directly a server machine. Overview of request dispatching mechanisms 2.