A study of data source selection in distributed web server system

Many large Web sites get more than millions hits everyday. They need a scalable Web server system that can provide better performance to all the clients that may be in different geographical regions. Higher delays and losses are common on wide area network (WAN) links. To provide a better service to all the clients, it is natural to have fully replicated web server clusters in different geographical regions. In such an environment, one of the most important issues is that of server selection (and load balancing). Much work has been done in order to provide system support aimed at selecting reliable and efficient data source in distributed Web server environment (DWSE). This paper reports the significance of this topic, some of the previous/current work in this area and a brief discussion on possible data source selection methods where intelligent agents is used to select the most probable server in the DWSE.