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.