Abstract: Systems and methods for managing inventory in an online advertising system are described herein. The inventory may comprise advertisement (“ad”) impressions. In accordance with certain implementations, the systems and methods enable advertisers to target groups of inventory (e.g., “run of” inventory groups) made available by publishers and sold at a non-premium rate, while also enabling the publishers to selectively designate certain inventory within a given inventory group as premium. Inventory so designated is automatically excluded from an inventory group to which it would normally belong both during a booking process as well as during an ad serving process.

Abstract: Systems and methods for managing inventory in an online advertising system are described herein. The inventory may comprise advertisement (“ad”) impressions. In accordance with certain implementations, the systems and methods enable advertisers to target groups of inventory (e.g., “run of” inventory groups) made available by publishers and sold at a non-premium rate, while also enabling the publishers to selectively designate certain inventory within a given inventory group as premium. Inventory so designated is automatically excluded from an inventory group to which it would normally belong both during a booking process as well as during an ad serving process.

Abstract: Systems and methods for determining the availability of resources, such as Internet advertising opportunities, are described herein. A query may be received to determine eligible resource inventory for a set of attributes and attribute values received in the query. The query may overlap with inventory that protected, and thus is desired to not be covered by the query. Accordingly, the query may be modified to include additional attributes and attribute values, or to include one or more inventory protection tags, to prevent the query from overlapping with the protected inventory. Furthermore, advertisement campaigns may be modified in a similar manner to prevent protected inventory from matching the advertisement campaigns. Still further, individual inventory items may be annotated with tags to prevent the inventory items from being associated with protected inventory defined by tags.

Abstract: A web server configured to respond to client requests over a network such as the World Wide Web includes a web listener having a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) daemon, a plurality of extension programs configured to perform respective operations, and a web request broker configured to identify one of the programs for responding to a client request, and determine the availability of an instance of the identified program. The web request broker maintains control of multiple instances of each server extension program to provide enhanced server operation without overwhelming server resources. The web request broker maintains a minimum number of instances of the identified program in memory, each executed in its own address space. The web request broker determines whether an available instance of the identified program is available from an existing number of instances, and selectively initiates a new instance of the program if no other instance is available.

Abstract: A system, method, and computer readable-medium for performing operations associated with browser requests are provided. The system includes a plurality of dispatchers coupled to a plurality of web listeners. Each of the dispatchers receives from a corresponding web listener browser requests received by the corresponding web listener. The system further includes a virtual path manager and a resource manager. The virtual path manager is coupled to the dispatchers through an inter-machine communication mechanism. The virtual path manager indicates to the dispatchers which of a cartridges is associated with the browser requests. The resource manager is coupled to the dispatchers through the inter-machine communication mechanism. The resource manager is configured to assign to each dispatcher of the dispatchers an instance of a cartridge of the cartridges in response to receiving a request for an instance from the dispatcher.