Patent ID: 7606916

Claim:
A method of load-balancing within a computer system, comprising: (a) receiving a message representative of a request for computer resources from a supplicant, said message including a unique supplicant identifier; (b) extracting the supplicant identifier from said message; associating the supplicant with one of a plurality of available resources in dependence upon the supplicant identifier; storing said association on a load balancing server that is coupled to and logically interposed between the supplicant and the available resources; on receipt of a further message including message information from said supplicant, using said association to direct said message information, as originally received, toward said one resource; and recording supplicant identifiers as messages are received, and storing each said respective identifier in an identifier look-up table against the respective resource with which it has been associated; and maintaining a function look-up table, the table storing an identifier of each available resource for each possible output of a mapping function based on the supplicant identifier, and in which, if no entry currently exists in the identifier look-up table on receipt of a message from a supplicant, making the association in dependence upon the function look-up table, and writing a new entry to the identifier look-up table; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.