Distributing client requests refers to the process of evenly distributing incoming requests from clients across multiple servers or resources in a network or server cluster. This distribution is often used to balance the load and ensure efficient utilization of resources, preventing any single server from being overwhelmed with too many requests. There are various techniques and strategies to achieve this:

  1. Load Balancing: Load balancers are devices or software applications that evenly distribute incoming traffic among multiple servers. They can operate on different layers of the network stack, such as the transport layer (Layer 4) or the application layer (Layer 7). Load balancers use algorithms and health checks to determine which server should handle each incoming request.
  2. Round Robin: This is a simple load balancing technique where incoming requests are assigned to servers in a circular order. Each server takes a turn handling requests. This approach ensures an even distribution of traffic, but it doesn’t consider the actual load on each server.
  3. Weighted Round Robin: Similar to Round Robin, but servers are assigned different weights based on their capabilities or resources. Servers with higher capacity are given a larger share of the incoming requests.
  4. Least Connections: In this method, the load balancer directs the incoming request to the server with the fewest active connections. This approach aims to evenly distribute the load based on the actual load of each server.
  5. Least Response Time: This strategy directs the incoming request to the server with the lowest response time, ensuring that the server can quickly handle the request and respond.
  6. IP Hash: Each client’s IP address is used to determine which server should handle their requests. This ensures that all requests from a particular client are sent to the same server, which can be useful for maintaining session states.
  7. Content-Based Routing: Requests are distributed based on specific content in the request, such as URL paths, headers, or cookies. This method is commonly used in Layer 7 load balancing for applications with different URL routes.
  8. Geographic Load Balancing: Requests are directed to servers based on the geographic location of the client. This is particularly useful for applications that need to serve clients in different regions.
  9. Dynamic Load Balancing: Load balancers continuously monitor server health and adjust the distribution of requests based on the real-time performance and availability of servers.
  10. DNS Load Balancing: DNS records are configured to return different IP addresses for the same domain, distributing requests across multiple servers. However, this method has limitations in terms of failover and responsiveness.

Distributing client requests helps ensure high availability, scalability, and optimal performance of applications and services. It’s a fundamental concept in designing resilient and efficient network and server architectures.