Patent ID: 7616640

Claim:
A method of load balancing the processing of service requests between at least two service component instances, the method being performed by a processor in an electronic environment, the method comprising: associating a first ticket amount with a first instance and a second ticket amount with a second instance, using a load balancer; scheduling the first instance to receive a service request and decrementing the first ticket amount, if the first ticket amount is greater than a threshold amount and the first instance is selectable from the at least two service components instances under a predetermined scheme, or if the first instance is the only instance within the at least two instances having a ticket amount greater than the threshold amount; and scheduling the second instance to receive the service request and decrementing the second ticket amount, if the second ticket amount is greater than the threshold amount and the second instance is selectable from the at least two service components instances under a predetermined scheme, or if the second instance is the only instance within the at least two instances having a ticket amount greater than the threshold amount.