Consistent Hashing

Consistent Hashing is a hashing that can be used to minimize the shuffling of users when a server is removed or added.

This is how it's implemented:

• each server name is converted into a unique number
• that number is projected on an modulo interval (a circle)
• every user is also converted into a unique number and projected on the circle
• the server that's the closest to the user is picked

If you want nice drawing go here.

This is an elegant solution because removing a server keeps the rest stable, and adding one server shuffles a minimal number of users.

The conversion from a name to a integer is key here: you have to be deterministic but in the same time try to have the numbers randomly and kind-of-evenly distributed on the circle.

Here's how you can do it using MD5:

import hashlib

def hash(key):
    return long(hashlib.md5(key).hexdigest(), 16)

Using a classical hash like MD5 gives us the random part, but depending on the server name you might well end up with two servers that are very close to each other on the circle

And the result will be that when the users are converted into numbers, a very small amount of users will go to some servers.

One solution to fix that is to add replicas: for each server, instead of projecting a single number on the circle, we'll project 100. For example, "server1" becomes "server1:1", "server1:2", .., "server1:100" and those values are transformed into numbers.

Using replicas is very efficient to make sure users are spread evenly.

RendezVous

The other algorithm is called RendezVous and is based on a similar idea where servers are converted into numbers with a hash.

The difference is that instead of projecting servers and their replicas on a circle, the algorithm uses weights. To find which server a user should use, for each combination of server and user, a number is created with a classical hash function.

The server that's picked is the one with the highest number.

The Python code looks like this:

def get_server(user):
    high_score = -1
    winner = None

    for server in server:
        score = hash(server + user)
        if score > high_score:
            high_score, winner = score, ip
        elif score == high_score:
            high_score, winner = score, max(server, winner)

    return winner

The advantage of this method is that you don't have to create replicas to worry about distribution. In fact, according to my tests, RendezVous is doing a better job than Consistent Hashing for distributing users.

One key decision is to decide which hashing algorithm you want to use.

It's all about the hashing!

Both RendezVous and Consistent hashing are using a classical hashing function to convert the servers and users into numbers - and picking one was not obvious.

I came across this amazing stackexchange post that shed some light on different hashing, their strengths and weaknesses. You should read it, you will learn a lot.

The take away for my experiment was that some hashing functions are doing a better job at randomizing values in the hash space. Some very simple functions are also colliding quite often, which can be a problem.

So I tried a bunch of them and benchmarked them.

It's interesting to note that I had much better results for my use case using RendezVous & sha256 than RendezVous & Murmur, when the latter is usually what people use with RendezVous.

I ended up removing Murmur from my tests, the results where too bad.

Anyways, here's the full implementation I did, based on snippets I found here and there, and the result:

The gist

And the winnner is : RendezVous and sha256

Of course, that entirely depends on how many servers & users you have.