What is the primary function of a load balancer?

The primary function of a load balancer is to distribute network or application traffic across multiple servers. This process ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed with too much traffic, which can lead to performance degradation or downtime. By intelligently routing user requests to different servers based on current load, the load balancer enhances application availability, fault tolerance, and responsiveness.

In addition to distributing traffic evenly among servers, load balancers can also perform health checks to monitor server performance, rerouting traffic away from servers that are down or underperforming. This contributes to a more robust and reliable user experience.

The other options relate to different aspects of IT infrastructure. Temporary data storage pertains to caching, encryption focuses on data security during transmission, and regular data backups are crucial for data preservation but do not involve load balancing traffic among servers. Thus, while all the functions mentioned are important in IT, the specific role of load balancers is centered around managing and optimizing network and application traffic.