Patent ID: 7987268

Claim:
A method of serving data to a plurality of clients in a client-server environment, comprising the steps of: generating a plurality of versions of given data in which at least two versions of the given data have different overheads associated therewith, the overhead of a given version of the given data comprising a quantity of processing resources required to serve the given version of the given data; assigning individual clients to one of a plurality of quality-of-service classes; and satisfying requests so that a client belonging to a high quality-of-service class is given preferential access to data versions which require higher overheads to serve while a client belonging to a low quality-of-service class receives a data version which requires lower overhead to serve; wherein the overhead to serve a version is correlated with a quality of the version; wherein the plurality of versions comprise images of different resolutions and clients belonging to the high quality-of-service class are given preferential access to higher resolution images while a client belonging to the low quality-of-service class receives a lower resolution image; wherein the quality of a version is correlated with a processing time required to create the version; and wherein the steps are performed at least in part by at least one processor.