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You are here: Home / Blog / Video: Tyler McMullen – Load Balancing is Impossible

Video: Tyler McMullen – Load Balancing is Impossible

4th April 2018 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Blog

 

Load balancing is something most of us assume is a solved problem. But the idea that load balancing is “solved” could not be further from the truth. If you use multiple load balancers, the problem is even worse. Most of us use “random” or “round-robin” techniques, which have certain advantages but are highly inefficient. Others use more complex algorithms like “least-conns,” which can be more efficient but have horrific edge cases. “Consistent hashing” is a very useful technique, but only applies to certain problems. There are several factors that exist both in theory and practice that make efficient load balancing an exceptionally hard problem.

For instance:

  • Poisson request arrival times
  • Exponentially distributed response latency
  • Oscillations when sharing data between multiple load balancers

Luckily, there are techniques and algorithms that have been developed that can make life better. I’ll walk through some of the ways that we can do better than “random,” “round-robin,” and naive “least-conns,” even with distributed load balancers

 

Link: Tyler McMullen – Load Balancing is Impossible – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpvbOzHUakA

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at http://packetpushers.net- now the largest networking podcast on the Internet.

My personal blog at http://gregferro.com

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