[jeffbee]

Thanks for the detailed reply. It would be interesting to see your plots of latency broken down by hardware class and plotted as a function of load. I'd be pretty surprised if optimal latency was achieved near idle, since in my experience latency is a U-shape with respect to utilization: bad at 100% but also bad at 0% since it takes time to wake resources that went to sleep.

I'm sure your system has its benefits, I just get triggered by "load balancing" since it is so pervasive while also being a highly misleading and defective metaphor.