Terhelésmegosztó

Terhelésmegosztó, a Hungarian term, translates to "load balancer" in English. It is a device or software application that distributes network traffic across multiple servers. The primary goal of a load balancer is to optimize resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single resource.

Load balancing is crucial for ensuring the availability and reliability of applications and websites. By distributing requests among a group of servers, often referred to as a server farm or server pool, a load balancer prevents any single server from becoming a bottleneck. If one server fails, the load balancer can redirect traffic to the remaining healthy servers, ensuring continuous service.

There are various methods load balancers use to distribute traffic, including round robin, where requests are distributed sequentially across servers; least connections, which sends new requests to the server with the fewest active connections; and IP hash, which uses a hash of the client's IP address to determine which server receives the request, ensuring a client's requests are consistently sent to the same server.

Load balancers can be implemented at different layers of the network model. Hardware load balancers are dedicated appliances, while software load balancers run on standard servers or as part of cloud services. They are essential components in modern IT infrastructure, supporting everything from e-commerce websites to large-scale enterprise applications.