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by hinkley 303 days ago
All else being equal, I like to have either a prime number of servers or a prime number of inflight requests per server. I’m always slightly afraid someone is going to send a batch of requests or tune a benchmark to be run a number of time that divides exactly evenly into the system parallelism and we won’t be testing what we think we are testing due to accidental locality of reference that doesn’t show up in the general population. Not unlike how you get uneven gear wear if you mesh two gears that have a large common denominator of tooth count, like a ratio of 3:1 or 2:3, so the same teeth keep meeting all the time.

But all else is seldom equal and Random 2 works as well or better.