Distributing processing and communications activity evenly across a
computer network so that no single
device is overwhelmed. Load balancing is especially important for networks where it’s difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a
server. Busy
Web sites typically employ two or more
Web servers in a load balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Load balancing can also refer to the communications channels themselves.