Alexandr Gomoliako Wrote:
> Here's a simple approach on consistent hashing
> with embedded perl:
> https://gist.github.com/2124034



Interesting. Clearly one could generate the upstream blocks via script.

The only potential issues I foresee are:
1) performance, as this perl will be called for 1000+ requests per second, and there are going to be potentially many upstream blocks. Maybe Digest::MurmurHash would help with performance instead of MD5 (it's supposedly 3x faster in Perl than Digest::MD5 while using far less state). A native hash ring implementation in C would obviously be far more performant.
2) a single backup server is problematic, but that can be fixed by adding more backups to the upstream blocks I think, or doing an error location that hashes again to find a new upstream. Not sure if a server being down would cause it to fail inside all upstream blocks it appears though, which might mean some very slow responses when a server goes offline.
3) Perl module is still marked as experimental, which scares me

I will give it a good long-term load test though, it might just be good enough!

Thanks!
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RPM