Question

I see many iphone games which require a connection to server.
Since the number of clients which a single server machine can serve is limited,
I guess people use some kind of load balancing.(when you expect huge # of clients)

Any hint on how to set up load balancing would be appreciated.

Specifically, my requirement on load-balancing is
group users from same country or similar region(altitude/longitude.. this doesn’t have to be precise, it is sufficient to group users from the same country)

Answer 1

If you control both the client and the server, you can do it programmatically:

1. Client logs into central server
2. Server uses a geolocation service to identify location of client IP address
3. Server tells client to connect to a different server
4. Client disconnects from central server and uses the specified server

That’s the large-scale picture. You’d also probably want to have local load-balancing for performance and redundancy within each site. This can be done using a load-balancing switch/router or round-robin DNS.