Patent ID: 8914502

Claim:
A traffic director which receives and communicates requests from clients to a plurality of pools of origin servers each comprising a plurality of origin servers, the traffic director comprising: a microprocessor and a computer memory; a dynamic configuration module wherein the dynamic configuration module stores information about the plurality of pools of origin servers and the pluralities of origin servers of said plurality of pools of origin servers; an HTTP connection handler which receives HTTP requests from said clients; an HTTP engine operating on said microprocessor and computer memory, wherein said HTTP engine receives said HTTP requests from said HTTP connection handler; a reverse proxy module in said HTTP engine, wherein the reverse proxy module selects a pool of said plurality of pools of origin servers to which said requests should be directed and forwards said requests one or more of the plurality of origin servers in said pool; and a health check subsystem within the reverse proxy module wherein the health check subsystem is configured to periodically send HTTP health check requests to each of said pluralities of origin servers of said plurality of pools of origin servers; receive HTTP health check responses from each of said pluralities of origin servers of said plurality of pools of origin servers; analyze said HTTP health check responses to determine whether any new server instance has been configured as an origin server within the plurality of pools of origin servers, and automatically update the dynamic configuration module, if a new server instance has been configured as indicated by said HTTP health check responses, to include the new server instance.