See an interesting discussion on benefits and shortcomings of “least used resource” mode of load balancing at High Scalability.

Here is what I think:

When dealing with TCP-based services (say http), my solution is not to use this load balancing mode at all precisely for this reason (you bring a new server online - and all of a sudden all connections are going to this new server). When backend servers change their state very fast, load balancers are always trying to catch up. The higher the load, the more likely they will fall behind - if that happens, they will be distributing connections based on state information from some point in the past (and you never know how far in the past). Round robin (possibly weighted) is much simpler and more reliable, imho.

Yan over at skwpspace.com, who also works at CohesiveFT, wrote an excellent post on 5 reasons you should blog. I would add another to his 5: I view this site as well as my blog as a central index of my activities in blogosphere and social Internet, which I want to be linkable to me.

You probably visit tons of blogs or sites, either through your RSS reader or when researching a topic. You might leave a comment here and there. In the end, you will end up with dispersed comments on multiple sites and only search engines will know about the link between you and those posts. If you want this link to be easier to see and follow, a personal blog is a great tool to help you achieve that.

Elastic Server On Demand is now open to all with no registration required. You can browse around the site, see what it's all about and even build a limited number of Elastic Servers. While you are there, check out Community Servers space where people share their stacks - including this "tracks Getting Things Done" server. Download it, launch it (or rebuild it in your favorite virtualization format) - and start getting organized. If you have a particular integration recipe that you think can be interesting to others - feel free to upload your packages and share them.

Check out this great review of my VcubeV article by Todd Hoff of Highscalability.com.

Have you ever needed to expand your colocated servers at more than one provider and allow applications to communicate as if they were on the same LAN, possibly over multiple sets of firewalls and layers of NAT? Or, maybe you’ve wanted to move from one hosting service to another to take advantage of lower pricing or better uptime but would have preferred to do it gradually instead of in a single swoop (and a weekend-long maintenance window)? Or, maybe you’ve considered the Amazon EC2 cloud to host part, but not all, of your infrastructure? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, what you want is essentially a multisourced infrastructure.