LineRate scripting and reducing large application latency

Can LineRate’s Node.js Scripting help reduce response time latency for large applications? Recently, a talk at Velocity 2014 by Jeff Dean gave me some ideas for a quick script to do just that.

The idea is simple; any time a response is not received quickly, just replicate the request to another server. I put together a very simple and admittedly naïve script and config snippet to do just that. A more advanced script providing more of Jeff Dean’s ideas is certainly possible. Optimizations such as aborting duplicate requests and server coordination to cancel batched jobs are possible.

Check out the summary and video of Jeff Dean’s talk for many more details behind Google’s implementation and other ideas for enhancing this script. Keep your eye on this script on my github for future updates: https://github.com/ldm5180/lr-lowlatency.