Hi! I've written a simple server application which will run distributed on several machines.

My question is how does a network load balancer works, in general?

I've heard of round-robin and other algorithms, but what I haven't got answer to is how does the process really goes? In socket terms.

The client connects to one of the load balancer machines, asks for a "free-to-connect-to" server and simply connects to it?
That's the simpliest way I can think of.
.. or, does it use the load balancer as a proxy (that implies that all the NBs must be always connected to the application servers, and data is transferred through them)?

It's more of a general question. How would you do this?

Thank you all!