Patent ID: 8185654

Claim:
A method for satisfying requests in a system comprised of a plurality of servers, comprising the steps of: providing at least one load balancer for routing requests to the plurality of servers; obtaining, at the at least one load balancer, a request from a client; examining, at the at least one load balancer, the request; estimating costs of satisfying the request by at least two of the plurality of servers based on estimating at least one of a number and a cost of at least one remote access for satisfying the request; augmenting the request, at the at least one load balancer, with at least a portion of information obtained during the cost estimation step such that the server to which the request is routed refrains from performing redundant calculations to determine the information used to augment the request; and routing the request to a server of the plurality of servers with a low estimated cost of satisfying the request.