Design and practice of a dispatch server architecture

Due to the rapid growth of World Wide Web applications on the Internet, a web server may encounter the situation that a huge number of connection requests coming in within a very short period of time. We call it the "connections explosion", which usually causes the web server system overload or even to crash if the problem were not prevented in advance. This article presents a dispatch server architecture that deals with the connection explosion problem as well as achieving the load balancing among multiple server machines. The system has been implemented and deployed for real public applications, and it functions satisfactorily.