|
|
|
|
|
|
by illirik
1946 days ago
|
|
|
Great article, always love to see the law of large numbers fail! You mention that the solution "requires all clients to cooperate" - wouldn't it be in the client's best interest to cooperate (maximizes the probability the request is served, as well as minimizes latency)? I suppose a malicious client could deliberately route traffic to a fully-utilized node, but that seems outside the scope of this problem space |
|
|
Fundamentally, P2C thickens the interface between client and server by leaking the implementation and responsibility of balancing server load onto the client. Again, this works really well if there is a small, static set of clients as we have internally, but not that well if the clients are out in the wild (eg: on mobile devices). It's totally in the client's interest to upgrade, but that's always work and you just can't rely on that. :)
So imo this is a serious tradeoff that must be made before employing P2C. A good hybrid approach (briefly mentioned in the post) is to introduce a proxy that uses P2C. This is fully in your control and is cheaper than having the proxy maintain a full histogram of load on all downstreams.