What is the Dispatcher?

The Dispatcher is the Adobe caching and/or load balancing tool that helps realize a fast and dynamic Web authoring environment. For caching, the Dispatcher works as part of an HTTP server, such as Apache, with the aim of storing (or "caching") as much of the static website content as possible and accessing the website's layout engine as infrequently as possible. In a load balancing role, the Dispatcher distributes user requests (load) across different clustered AEM instances (renders). For caching, the Dispatcher module uses the Web server's ability to serve static content. The Dispatcher places the cached documents in the document root of the Web server.