Patent ID: 7003572

Claim:
A system for efficiently forwarding client requests in a distributed computing environment, comprising: a socket receiving a plurality of client requests commonly routed for forwarding to an origin server from individual sending clients into a proxy server connectively interposed between the sending clients and the origin server; a time estimates generator dynamically generating at the proxy server, concurrent to and during processing of each request by the proxy server, time estimates of service availability based on a time-to-idle for sending the requests over each of a plurality of network connections from the proxy server to the origin server, wherein time-to-idle for each network connection is calculated based on the amount of time that will elapse before an active network connection is usable for a subsequent client request; and a network connection manager selecting the network connection from the proxy server to the origin server with a substantially highest service availability and a substantially lowest time-to-idle and forwarding each request from the proxy server to the origin server using the selected network connection.