Patent ID: 8073953

Claim:
A method comprising: maintaining, at a load balancing resolver, a list of servers mapped to a domain name; wherein the list of servers that are mapped to the domain name includes a plurality of servers, each server of which has a different address than each other server in the plurality of servers, and each server of which has a separate closeness measure that measures closeness of the server to the load balancing resolver; receiving, at the load balancing resolver, a request from a client to identify an address that corresponds to the domain name; performing a comparison of the closeness measures of the servers in the plurality of servers; based at least in part on the comparison, selecting a particular server that is mapped to the domain name from the plurality of servers; wherein the particular server is selected based, at least in part, on nearness of the particular server to the load balancing resolver, which nearness is indicated by the closeness measure of the particular server; wherein the particular server has a particular address; in response to the request to identify an address that corresponds to the domain name, based on the selecting, the load balancing resolver responding to the client with a message specifying that the domain name corresponds to the particular address of the particular server; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.