Load balancing is a technique aiming at distributing workload in a computer network, in order to optimally utilize resources, avoid overload and maximize throughput.
Computer clusters rely on load balancing to distribute workload across network links, CPUs, web servers, etc.
A server farm is a common application of load balancing, where multiple servers seamlessly provide a single Internet service. In this case the load balancer accepts requests from external clients and forwards them to one of the available backend servers according to a scheduling algorithm (e.g. round robin, random choice, on a reported load basis, etc.)
Load balancers can be implmented using dedicated hardware or ad-hoc software.
In the remainder of this tutorial we deal with configuration and features of the Apache web server’s mod_proxy_balancer, the Apache module developed to provide load balancing over a set of web servers.
The tutorial covers basic installation and configuration under any Linux distribution.
