**Abstract**

Computational approaches contribute a significance role in various fields such as medical applications, astronomy, and weather science, to perform complex calculations in speedy manner. Today, personal computers are very powerful but underutilized. Most of the computer resources are idle; 75% of the time and server are often unproductive. This brings the sense of distributed computing, in which the idea is to use the geographically distributed resources to meet the demand of high-performance computing. The Internet facilitates users to access heterogeneous services and run applications over a distributed environment. Due to openness and heterogeneous nature of distributed computing, the developer must deal with several issues like load balancing, interoperability, fault occurrence, resource selection, and task scheduling. Load balancing is the mechanism to distribute the load among resources optimally. The objective of this chapter is to discuss need and issues of load balancing that evolves the research scope. Various load balancing algorithms and scheduling methods are analyzed that are used for performance optimization of web resources. A systematic literature with their solutions and limitations has been presented. The chapter provides a concise narrative of the problems encountered and dimensions for future extension.

**Keywords:** load balancing, resource management, resource scheduling, load measurement, fault tolerance
