Patent ID: 8874754

Claim:
A system comprising: a load balancer; and a plurality of workers; wherein each worker comprises at least one processor configured to process requests to authenticate handwritten signatures, and wherein the load balancer comprises at least one processor configured to: accumulate a plurality of requests, each request identifying at least one handwritten signature to be authenticated, the each request received from a client application, wherein accumulating the plurality of requests comprises classifying the each request as urgent or non-urgent according to a service level agreement (SLA) covering the client application, wherein classifying the each request as urgent or non-urgent comprises determining a priority indicator of the each request according to T min /T and N/N max , wherein T and N denote an average response time and a number of requests processed per unit time, respectively, specified in the SLA covering the client application, wherein T min is a lower bound of T and N max is an upper bound of N, and wherein the lower and upper bounds are taken over a plurality of SLAs currently active in the system; determine whether an accumulation condition for the plurality of requests is satisfied; and in response, when the accumulation condition is satisfied, for a target request of the plurality of requests, select a target worker from the plurality of workers according to a first measure of performance of the target worker in processing an urgent request, according to a second measure of performance of the target worker in processing a non-urgent request, and further according to a relationship between a count of accumulated urgent requests and a count of accumulated non-urgent requests, and in response to selecting the target worker, send the target request to the target worker for processing.