SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING WEB SERVICES WITH LOAD BALANCING

摘要

A method, apparatus, andarticle of manufacture for providing webservices with load balancing of imageprocessing in a document processingenvironment. A Load Balancing Web Servicehosted on a network connected server receivesweb services processing requests fromapplication programs using a web servicesinterface. The load balancing web serviceforwards these processing requests to dataprocessing web services running on a pluralityof web servers using a priority schemethat attempts to assign requests based upondifferences in the processing time needed bythese servers to process pending requests, andbased on round robin cycling when there areno differences in the processing time neededby these servers to process requests. The loadbalancing web service receives responses fromthe data processing web services running ona plurality of web servers and forwards theresponses to the application programs.