[ibdknox]

My argument was built on the premise that random routing isn't acceptable given the potential slow downs it can cause (as pointed out in the Rap Genius post). If you believe otherwise, then there's no real argument for me to make :)

With that said, in your example, you could do one and two together and the response doesn't need to wait on the completion of #3. So it's one network roundtrip, which I would imagine is a tiny fraction of what they're having to do already. It is certainly another moving piece, but again my argument is that they have to have a solution and this doesn't seem infeasible.

[gojomo]

As I've written elsewhere, I think just having a way for dynos to refuse load (by not accepting a connection, or returning an error or redirect), such that the load tries another dyno, will probably achieve most of the benefits of 'intelligent' routing. And, preserve the stateless scalability of the 'routing mesh'.