Summary: The load balancer acts as a high speed local client to the server farm by terminating all client-side TCP connections, buffering the data to/from the slower Internet, and spooling traffic to/from the servers across multiplexed connections for increased server efficiency.
Why: Leading analysts like Gartner call this next generation load balancer the ‘Advanced Platform Application Delivery Controller’ which functions as a web application proxy and offloads server functions to increase the capacity of the web farm. Advanced load balancers should provide multiple effective features to improve web site performance without resorting to adding more and more servers i.e. server sprawl.