Chapter . Content Networking

Coordinating Access to Limited Resources

Air-traffic controllers coordinate access to runways. Busy airports have more planes wanting to take off and land than runways available. Runways can only facilitate one plane at a time. In generic terms, the air-traffic controllers coordinate access to a limited resource (the runway).

Such is the purpose of content switches: coordinating access to limited resources, in this case, through load balancing. The primary example for content switching is the load balancing of HTML and XML traffic among multiple web servers.

The number of users needing to access a particular website might exceed the capacity of a single server. You could implement multiple servers to handle the increased ...

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