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Admittedly, consistent hashing is a widely used technology in distributed caching applications. It offers a good solution when the number of nodes changes dynamically. And when the virtual node is combined, the load balancing problem will also be solve.

I am just wondering is there any disadvantages or limitations of this technique?

Thanks!

Geni
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2 Answers2

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Consistent hashing isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than the old modulo hashing. I wrote about this a while back and included details on an alternative that we use that does lead to perfect mapping while allowing nodes to be added or removed.

Dustin
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Yes, the main drawback is the snowball (or cascading) effect caused by a single node failing under stress which overloads its neighbor node with the transfer of keys from the died node and it may eventually fail due to the increased load and then the load transferred to its neighbor node and so on. Ultimately causing all the nodes to fail.

user1234
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