Highest Random Weight in Elixir
The article discusses the concept of Highest Random Weight (HRW) hashing in Elixir, highlighting its simplicity and stateless nature compared to traditional consistent hashing methods like ExHashRing. While HRW offers ease of use and avoids state management, it has a performance drawback with larger node lists due to its linear time complexity. The author provides benchmarks and comparisons between HRW and ExHashRing, noting that for smaller node counts, the performance difference is minimal.
- ▪HRW hashing is simpler and stateless compared to consistent hashing methods like ExHashRing.
- ▪ExHashRing is faster and more efficient with larger node counts, while HRW performs better with fewer nodes.
- ▪The basic HRW implementation uses a scoring function to determine the highest value for node assignment.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Highest Random Weight in Elixir May 21, 2026 15 min read elixir hrw oss Consistent hashing is a common building block for distributed Elixir and enables fairly low complexity and high value design patterns, like the distributed rate limiter or cache. I’ve written about it before. The most common way of assigning keys to nodes, ensuring that any node participating in the cluster can figure out which node owns the given key, is Discord’s ExHashRing. This is an incredibly battle-tested and reliable library with excellent performance characteristics, and I’ve only had good experiences with it. That said, it does have a downside. You have to start and manage the ring processes.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at jola.dev.
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