logoalt Hacker News

cyberpunktoday at 8:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

Anyone have an idea how it behaves differently from google's jump hash algorithm? The cool thing about google's one is it's so short I can include it in a HN comment:

    int32_t JumpConsistentHash(uint64_t key, int32_t num_buckets) {
      int64_t b = 1, j = 0;
      while (j < num_buckets) {
        b = j;
        key = key * 2862933555777941757ULL + 1;
        j = (b + 1) * (double(1LL << 31) / double((key >> 33) + 1));
      }
      return b;
    }
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2294

Replies

cyberpunktoday at 9:02 PM

Well I looked it up; nginx, apparently, uses ketama -- it's a ring-style hash probably works better for web backends than the jch above, as when given [0,1,2,3] and replacing the server in slot 1 you're going to have a lot of hash moves. With ketama, you'd only have the '1' hashes moving. You can't really beat google's for brevity, though.

priruntoday at 9:56 PM

I have used Google's jump hash. As I recall, one of the main differences is that jump hash doesn't have a mechanism to remove targets, eg, a server dies and you don't want to route requests to it. Traditional consistent hashing can do that. I guess if you had 4 servers, server #4 dies, then you can go back to 3 servers by just changing num_buckets from 4 to 3. But if server 1 dies, you can't.

Jump hash does allow adding more targets and preserves the property that most request targets stay the same when adding a new target, so if you had 3 targets and add a fourth, ~8% of the requests that would have been sent to targets 1-3 are sent to target 4, evenly chosen from servers 1-3.