Weighted Round-Robin DNS Solutions?

The round-robin algorithm is often used as a simple-yet-effective method of distributing requests to a single-point-of-entry to multiple servers in the background. It’s used by DNS servers, peer-to-peer networks, and many other multiple-node clusters/networks.

In a nutshell, round-robin algorithms pair an incoming request to a specific machine by cycling (or, more specifically, circling) through a list of servers capable of handling the request. It’s a common solution to many network load balancing needs, even though it does not result in a perfectly-balanced load distribution, strictly speaking. In the non-ideal world we our servers live in, there are many reasons why the stock round-robin algorithm just isn’t good enough when it comes to properly balancing server loads.

The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that not all servers are created equal. One should be able to take advantage of all available resources, and it’s impossible to guarantee that all the servers available to process incoming requests are capable of dealing with the same load quantities, take as long to carry out each command, and deal with larger/longer queues as elegantly. Nor can all requests be treated the same, either. Some take longer to process than others, involve more work, and are generally more-demanding than the rest – just as others are finished relatively fast and with far-fewer resources.

Weighted round-robin is one way addressing these shortcomings. In particular, it provides a clean and effective way of solving the first-half of the problem by focusing on fairly distributing the load amongst available resources, verses attempting to equally distribute the requests.

In the server environment, a difference in server capacities and processing capabilities can result in a more-marked difference in the performance of the different servers (read: less balanced) when compared to the effect of a difference in the requests themselves.

In a weighted round-robin algorithm, each destination (in this case, server) is assigned a value that signifies, relative to the other servers in the list, how that server performs. This “weight” determines how many more (or fewer) requests are sent that server’s way; compared to the other servers on the list.

Take, for example, the case of web servers. Assume you have three servers that have been individually benchmarked and configured that are to be deployed in a weighted round-robin environment. The first can handle 100 req/sec, the second can do 300 req/sec, and the last can only do 25 req/sec (all on average, tested with an automated benchmark serving the same data). Normally, with such a discrepancy in the servers’ performance, the third would be excluded from the setup entirely. But in a weighted round-robin, each server can be assigned as much as it can handle in the round-robin configuration script/file:

Resource			Weight
--------			------
server1.fqdn	     4
server2.fqdn	    12
server3.fqdn	     1

It’s pretty clear what happens next: for every 12 requests sent to server two, 4 will be sent to server one, and just 1 will be sent to server 3. The result is a more even, if less equal, load distribution.

The only problem with weighted round-robin algorithms is that they haven’t been adopted by the majority of the load-distribution implementations on the market…

…Which brings us to the point of this article. You may have noticed the question mark in the title – it’s there for a reason. Do you know of any load-distribution implementations that operate based on the weighted round-robin principle? On Linux it wouldn’t take more than a couple of fairly-trivial changes to the code for your favorite DNS server to switch from round-robin load distribution to a weighted round-robin solution… But the same cannot be said for Windows where Microsoft’s DNS server is the standard. So the question stands: what kind of load distribution solutions can you recommend with support for weighted round-robin load balancing, if any?