Constitent Hashing

Just use rendezvous hashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing). It's simpler, and more general. Eg you don't have to muck around with virtual nodes. Everything just works out, even for small numbers of targets.

It's also easier to come up with an exact weighted version of rendezvous hashing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing#Weighted_re... for the weighted variant.

Faintly related: if you are into load balancing, you might also want to look into the 'power of 2 choices'. See eg https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/mythesis.... or this HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37143376

The basic idea is that you can vastly improve on random assignment for load balancing by instead picking two servers at random, and assigning to the less loaded one.

It's an interesting topic in itself, but there's also ways to combine it with consistent hashing / rendezvous hashing.

The typo is really really bothering me, because the future generations would not be able to search for it.

Shameless plug for my super simple consistent-hashing implementation in clojure: https://github.com/ryuuseijin/consistent-hashing

A final mention of the “simplifying” Lamping-Veach algorithm would have been great: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.2294.pdf?ref=fr...

seems worth fixing the spelling mistake here - this is a consistent hashing post (currently "constitent hashing")

Can't mention this without mentioning Akamai founder Lewin, who had a sad ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin

s/Constitent/Consistent/

Unless it's a clever play on "consistent", that is. In which case: carry on.