What is Dispatcher?

In web server contexts, a Dispatcher is often a load balancer or reverse proxy component. Its primary role is to distribute incoming client requests across multiple backend servers. This improves performance, reliability, and scalability by preventing any single server from becoming overloaded. The Dispatcher typically handles tasks such as request routing, session affinity (ensuring a user's requests are consistently directed to the same server), and health checks to remove unhealthy servers from the pool. Apache's mod_proxy_balancer is an example.