What Is Load Balancing?

Load balancing shares the network traffic between two or more servers so that a single server does not get loaded with requests. Load balancing increases performance and reliability. You can use multiple processors or multiple threads in a single processor for load balancing.

Load balancing does not require dedicated software and hardware nodes. DNS servers can run the round-robin algorithm against multiple IP Addresses associated with a single domain name.

Squid is generally used to act as a caching proxy server. It sends client HTTP requests to the proxy server. The proxy server fetches web pages in accordance with the cache setup, and returns them to the client.

Squid can be used to perform basic round-robin load balancing, and to cache results based on your cache configuration.