The following diagram shows the architecture of a typical Terracotta-enabled web application.

The load balancer parcels out HTTP requests from the Internet to each application server. To maximize the locality of reference of the clustered HTTP session data, the load balancer uses HTTP session affinity so all requests corresponding to the same HTTP session are routed to the same application server. However, with a Terracotta-enabled web application, any application server can process any request. Terracotta Web Sessions clusters the sessions, allowing sessions to survive node hops and failures.

The application servers run both your web application and the Terracotta client software, and are called "clients" in a Terracotta cluster. As many application servers may be deployed as needed to handle your site load.

For more information about the Terracotta clusters, refer to the BigMemory Max Administrator Guide.