Patent ID: 8886814

Claim:
A method, operable in a load-balancing cluster comprising: (i) a switch having a plurality of ports; and (ii) a plurality of servers connected to at least some of the plurality of ports of the switch, each of said servers being addressable by the same virtual Internet Protocol (VIP) address, the method comprising: (A) in response to a connection request at said switch to connect a client computer to a server associated with said VIP address, a first server of said plurality of servers establishing a first connection with the client computer as a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection; (B) after establishing the TCP connection with the client computer in (A), and in response to a resource request received by said first server from said client computer for a particular resource, said first server determining whether or not to attempt to handoff the request to a second server of said plurality of servers based, at least in part, on at least one of: (b1) whether said second server had already handled a previous request from said client computer; (b2) whether said second server had already handled a previous request for said particular resource; (b3) whether said second server had previously served said particular resource to any computer; and (b4) at least some information associated with the resource request for the particular resource; (C) based on said determining in (B), said first server attempting to handoff the TCP connection with the client computer to the second server when said first server determines that it should attempt to handoff the request to the second server; and, (D) said second server rejecting the first server's attempted handoff of the TCP connection and said second server serving the particular resource to the client through the first server, wherein said second server rejecting the first server's attempted handoff of the TCP connection is based on at least one of: determining that a popularity value associated with the particular resource does not equal or exceed a popularity threshold value; and determining that a size value associated with the particular resource does not equal or exceed a size threshold value.