SERVICE PROVIDER CLASS APPLICATION SCALABILITY AND HIGH AVAILABILITY AND PROCESSING PRIORITIZATION USING A WEIGHTED LOAD DISTRIBUTOR AND THROTTLE MIDDLEWARE

Processing of tickets received by a ticket processing system is performed by allowing processes running on one or more hosts to access a ticket processing table to retrieve and process the tickets. A weighted load distributor (WLD) grants weighted round robin turn access to the processes running on the hosts. The WLDs running on different hosts coordinate so that a primary WLD is selected that is responsible for distributing turn access to the ticket processing table to various requesting processes. The hosts use a throttle to determine the real-time availability of resources for the hosts. The throttle determines whether a process should be allowed to proceed with processing tasks associated with a particular ticket based on resource costs associated with the required processing, as well as resources available to the respective host and ticket priority.