Patent ID: 7660894

Claim:
A connection pacer to pace the establishment of connections in a network of servers and clients, the connection pacer comprising: a pacing controller to receive from a server allocator server allocation information informing the pacing controller of an allocation of a server in the network performed by the server allocator, the allocated server to connect to a client in the network, the pacing controller further to send a first signal in response to receiving the server allocation information; a server pacing status module coupled to the pacing controller, the server pacing status module to store, in response to the first signal, connection pacing status information indicating that the allocated server is in a connection pacing state, wherein the allocated server is unavailable for any allocation to establish a network connection while in the connection pacing state; a pacing first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffer coupled to the pacing controller, the pacing FIFO buffer to store connection pacing data for one or more servers in a pacing state, wherein the pacing controller is further to update the pacing FIFO buffer in response to receiving the server allocation information, the updating including the pacing FIFO buffer storing an entry for the allocated server, the entry having, an identifier of the allocated server, and a removal trigger time indicating a time when the allocated server can be removed from the connection pacing state; and wherein the pacing controller is further to read the entry for the allocated server at an output of the pacing FIFO buffer, the pacing controller further to perform a comparison of a first value based on the removal trigger time of the read entry with a second value based on time information from a time source, and wherein in response to the comparison, the pacing controller is further to signal the server pacing status module to remove the allocated server from the connection pacing state, the removing including storing connection pacing status information indicating that the allocated server is available to establish a connection.