Patent ID: 8392611

Claim:
A method for Internet content delivery, comprising: establishing a content delivery network at network locations, the content delivery network comprising a set of content servers for serving content resources, wherein the set of content servers includes a plurality of subsets of content servers, each subset located at one of a plurality of Internet data centers; for each Internet Protocol (IP) address block from which requests for content resources are expected to be received, generating a candidate list of Internet data centers to be used to service the requests for content resource; for the IP address block, using a directed graph flow algorithm to select at least one of the Internet data centers from the candidate list to be used to service the requests for content resources, wherein the selecting step is carried out concurrently for each IP address block from which requests for content resources are expected to be received; using the selected Internet data center for each IP address block to generate a network map; providing the network map to a domain name service (DNS) associated with the content delivery network; and in response to a DNS query received at the domain name service associated with the content delivery network and directed to a hostname for which the domain name service is authoritative, using the network map to identify an Internet data center to be used to service a request for a content resource.