LOAD BALANCING COOPERATING CACHE SERVERS

摘要

In a system including a collection of cooperating cache servers, such as pro xy cache servers, a request can be forwarded to a cooperating cache server if t he requested object cannot be found locally. An overload condition is detected if for example, due to reference skew, some objects are in high demand by all t he clients and the cache servers that contain those hot objects become overload ed due to forwarded requests. In response, the load is balanced by shifting som e or all of the forwarded requests from an overloaded cache server to a less loaded one. Both centralized and distributed load balancing environments are described.