HTTP Developer’s Handbook

Distributing Computational Load

Computational load refers to the effort required to generate responses under heavy traffic. The distribution of computational load varies widely depending on your application as well as your platform. In general, there are two types of Web applications with regard to computational load:

• Query-intensive applications

• Resource-intensive applications

Query-intensive applications spend a lot of time querying a data store, so load is created when all available resources are waiting for the database responses and incoming requests are having to be queued rather than served. The general approach to overcome this type of load is to make more resources available to generate requests, as a server can likely handle running ...