Patent ID: 7676561

Claim:
A computer readable storage medium storing one or more routines executable by a computer processor running on at least one collection computer, the routines comprising: one or more load balancing routines that collect proportional server capability information for a plurality of servers, wherein the proportional server capability information is based at least in part on processing of sample requests transmitted to the plurality of servers during intervals; wherein the one or more load balancing routines encode the collected proportional server capability information in a weighted distribution that represents the plurality of servers in a weighted manner based at least in part on the proportional server capability information, the weighted manner reflecting a percentage of total server capability realized by each server, wherein the encoded load balancing is stored in a persistent or non-persistent memory of the collection computer, wherein the encoding is one of either a linked list, a binary search tree, a hash table or an array, and wherein a proportion of entries, for each server, in the linked list, binary search tree, hash table or array correspond to the proportional server capability of each server; and wherein the one or more routines further randomly select servers to process client requests from the weighted distribution.