Earlier this week, Blake asked me for some help with a problem he’s working on. He has a couple of hash functions that are being used to route web traffic to a number of different servers. A hash function takes an input, such as a blog’s url, and outputs a number between 0…
a lovely study of an underappreciated topic.
my initial reaction to this was to say “pfaw, nice theoretical challenge, but why introduce the complexity”. but that is based on a worldview where the front end is a hardworking minority of the system (so load balancing oddities are more effectively corrected economically - more capacity). in an application like tumblr, the frontend/backend ratio must be more balanced, so improving load balancing can matter, and therefore this is a pretty noble and worthy cause to pursue. kudos to some really clever work.
