Patrick Horgan <patrick@Verity.COM> writes:

...

I did a distributed scheme for something else that had two levels, a master and a group of slaves. Only the slaves talked to the master. For this effort I think a variation of the idea would be better. Have all of the brutes contact the master, who will, in the first transaction assign them to the next slave in a round-robin fashion.

Why not just have the brutes pick a slave at random? Of course, you need to give them a complete list of slaves to choose from. But then the only difference between the master and the slaves will be that the master doesn't get any keyspace (it's got it all to begin with) and doesn't report any results upward.

Better to include in the clients a list of all slaves and have the initial contact to a slave random, maybe weighted by network proximity, and either have the clients cycle to each slave with each ACK, or have the slave TELL the clients what server to ACK to next, based on slave to slave balancing. Slaves could tune their pointers to faster slaves and transparently handle crashed slaves The idea is to have all the slaves working evenly, assuming they are on equal nets and equal machines. If not then you can have the slaves tell clients to only point to a weaker slave once in a while. I dont think advertising the master is a good idea, better to have the slaves talking to it only. A backup mirror master would be worthwhile too. Web people would most likely have to communicate with the one central http server as you have to Keep It Simple for them. Comments? Mark