Hashing

• Turning anything into an integer value:

Clients Load Balancer Servers
[ ] 11 % 4 = 3 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 12 % 4 = 0 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 13 % 4 = 1 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 14 % 4 = 2 -->[ ]-----------> []

If you don't send requests to the same server, we get cache misses.

• We want a hash function which uniformly/evenly distributes traffic to our servers.

• This maximizes cache hits.

• What happens if we need to add a server?

[ ] 11 % 5 = 1 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 12 % 5 = 2 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 13 % 5 = 3 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 14 % 5 = 4 -->[ ]-----------> []
[ ] 15 % 5 = 0 -->[ ]-----------> []

• Now we get a bunch of cache misses, which will reduce performance.

• We can fix this with consistent caching:

• This is best imagined as a circle:

• the Clients have numbers, and the Servers are just uppercase letters.

• Each client is assigned to the next server it can find clockwise.

            D  C1
        , - ~ ~ ~ - ,
     , '               ' , C4
   ,                       , A
  ,                         ,
 ,                           ,
 ,                           , C3
 ,                           ,
  ,                         ,
   ,                       ,
     ,                  , '
 C     ' - , _ _ _ ,  ' B
             C2

• Let's add a new server (E):
  • If you ever add or remove a server, we only lose (log n) of our cache misses.

            D  C1    E
        , - ~ ~ ~ - ,
     , '               ' , C4
   ,                       , A
  ,                         ,
 ,                           ,
 ,                           , C3
 ,                           ,
  ,                         ,
   ,                       ,
     ,                  , '
 C     ' - , _ _ _ ,  ' B
             C2

• You can also hash multiple times, which helps with uneven hashing functions.