Load balancer

The load balancer controls the server load distribution for distributed applications or servers. Multiple computers form an array that appears to behave like a single system. The load balancer is connected upstream of the Web application servers and distributes the incoming queries because a single host can only respond to only a limited number of HTTP queries. The upstream load balancer adds information to the HTTP query in order to send queries of the same user to the same server.

For PPM installation scenarios, load balancer does not provide load distribution, merely a distribution of context-related queries to various services.