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Vansh Verma
← Lab

conshash

confirmedshipRustCluster & infrastructureJuly 17, 2026

the question

Does plain consistent hashing's max/average load imbalance track log n as the cluster grows, and do virtual nodes reduce it along a 1/sqrt(k) curve?

what came out

Over 2,000,000 keys the median max/average imbalance tracks ln(n): about 8x at 3,000 nodes, with the worst ring over 11x. Virtual nodes cut the overshoot along 1/sqrt(k): 10 points drop 8x to about 2.2x, and 100 to 200 points hold every node within roughly a quarter of the mean.

method & receipts

  • Result: confirmed
  • Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
  • Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
  • Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.

→ read the code and re-run it

github.com/v-code01/conshash