tree 409a885ec50178773d046682e6fa652d2d30c37e
parent 23968d898a68b21b49a83ffc74ff18bfd9323bb5
author Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> 1274821382 +0200
committer Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> 1275654999 +0200
encoding latin1

[BUG] consistent hash: balance on all servers, not only 2 !

It was once reported at least by Dirk Taggesell that the consistent
hash had a very poor distribution, making use of only two servers.
Jeff Persch analysed the code and found the root cause. Consistent
hash makes use of the server IDs, which are completed after the chash
array initialization. This implies that each server which does not
have an explicit "id" parameter will be merged at the same place in
the chash tree and that in the end, only the first or last servers
may be used.

The now obvious fix (thanks to Jeff) is to assign the missing IDs
earlier. However, it should be clearly understood that changing a
hash algorithm on live systems will rebalance the whole system.
Anyway, the only affected users will be the ones for which the
system is quite unbalanced already. The ones who fix their IDs are
not affected at all.

Kudos to Jeff for spotting that bug which got merged 3 days after
the consistent hashing !