Wirebook › Glossary › Load balancer
What is a load balancer?
In one sentence: A traffic controller that spreads requests across several servers.
A little more
Busy websites run on many servers at once. A load balancer sits in front of them, takes every incoming request and passes it to a server that has room, and stops sending work to any server that has crashed.
That way one website can handle far more visitors than any single machine could, and a broken server doesn't take the whole site down.
It's a bit like… The person at a supermarket who points you to the shortest checkout queue.