MANAGEMENT FACILITY FOR SERVER ENTRY AND APPLICATION UTILIZATION IN A MULTI-NODE SERVER CONFIGURATION

Disclosed is a server architecture for connecting to a plurality of remote client computers each seeking access to applications resident on the server. The architecture provides (1) a reliable, single point of entry for client users that enforces security and recovers immediately from failures; (2) connection management that monitors the user's level of online activity, terminating inactive connections both to save system resources and to limit unnecessary connection charges to the user; (3) application management that spreads users optimally among active application instances, maintaining a pool of available applications, initiating new instances when the pool is low, and which records a user's utilization of different applications for billing purposes; (4) system integrity, which is achieved through division of transaction-management responsibility among the various interrelated components of the invention; and (5) continuous, uninterrupted operation. The invention distributes tasks to different functional modules in a manner that promotes efficiency and ready accommodation of large numbers of users without processing delays.