Introducing load balancing

All of the most visited websites in the world are built over carefully planned server architectures; fast page loads and download speeds are a requirement for long-term traffic growth. The concept of load balancing has the potential to solve problems pertaining to scalability, availability, and performance. After a quick description of the concept, we will elaborate on how NGINX offers to implement such an architecture.

Understanding the concept of load balancing

To put it simply, the concept of load balancing consists of distributing the workload (CPU load, hard disk load, or other forms) across several servers, in a manner that is completely transparent to your visitors.

In the case of a single-server architecture, client requests are received and processed by one machine. A machine has a limited capacity of operation; for example, a web server that is able to respond to 1,000 HTTP requests per second. If the server receives more than 1,000 requests...