Abstract
Popular Web sites can neither rely on a single powerful server nor on independent mirrored-servers to support the ever increasing request load.
Scalability and availability can be provided by distributed Web-server architectures that schedule client requests among the multiple server nodes in a user-transparent way. In this paper we will review the state of the art in load balancing techniques on distributed Web-server systems. We will analyze the efficiency and limitations of the various approaches and their tradeoff.