(19) United States
(12) Patent Application Publication (io) Pub. No.: US 2002/0052942 Al
Swildens et al. (43) Pub. Date: May 2,2002
(54) CONTENT DELIVERY AND GLOBAL TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT NETWORK SYSTEM
(76) Inventors: Eric Sven-Johan Swildens, Mountain
View, CA (US); Richard David Day,
Mountain View, CA (US); Ajit K.
Gupta, Fremont, CA (US)
Correspondence Address:
GLENN PATENT GROUP
3475 EDISON WAY
SUITE L
MENLO PARK, CA 94025 (US)
(21) Appl. No.: 09/909,651
(22) Filed: Jul. 19, 2001
Related U.S. Application Data
(63) Continuation-in-part of application No. 09/641,746, filed on Aug. 18, 2000. Non-provisional of provisional application No. 60/219,172, filed on Jul. 19, 2000. Non-provisional of provisional application No. 60/219,166, filed on Jul. 19,2000. Non-provisional of provisional application No. 60/219,946, filed on Jul. 19, 2000. Non-provisional of provisional application No. 60/219,177, filed on Jul. 19, 2000.
Publication Classification
(51) Int. CI.7 G06F 15/173; G06F 15/16
(52) U.S. CI 709/223; 709/232
(57) ABSTRACT
A content delivery and global traffic management network system provides a plurality of caching servers connected to a network. The caching servers host customer content that can be cached and stored, and respond to requests for Web content from clients. If the requested content does not exist in memory or on disk, it generates a request to an origin site to obtain the content. A DNS Server (SPD) load balances network requests among customer Web servers and directs client requests for hosted customer content to the appropriate caching server which is selected by choosing the caching server that is closest to the user, is available, and is the least loaded. SPD also supports persistence and returns the same IP addresses, for a given client. The entire Internet address space is broken up into multiple zones. Each zone is assigned to a group of SPD servers. If an SPD server gets a request from a client that is not in the zone assigned to that SPD server, it forwards the request to the SPD server assigned to that zone. Servers write information about the content delivered to log files that are picked up by a log server.
