Load balancing is like having a bunch of cashiers at a grocery store, but for your servers. It's a way to distribute the workload across multiple servers so that no single server gets overwhelmed by traffic, kind of like how Facebook has to handle all those cat videos and political rants.

How to use it in a sentence

• "I was up all night trying to figure out the load balancing for our new app, but I think I finally got it working. Now I just need to find a way to balance my work and personal life."

• "When the marketing team asked how we were going to handle the traffic spike from the Super Bowl ad, I just mumbled something about load balancing and hoped they wouldn't ask any more questions."

If you actually want to learn more...

• Load testing with ApacheBench: Martin Kleppmann's blog post dives into the nitty-gritty of load testing a Rails application using ApacheBench. If you want to make sure your site doesn't crash harder than Twitter on Election Day, this is a good place to start. Read more

• Managing technical quality: This StaffEng guide explores key leverage points for maintaining and improving software quality, including interfaces, stateful systems, and data models. It's like a self-help book for your code. Read more

• Load Balancing 101: If you're still scratching your head about load balancing, this DigitalOcean tutorial breaks it down in simple terms, complete with pretty diagrams. Read more

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.