In the coming week or so, I will be committing my load balance, load determination and discovery work to a sandbox trunk. Many people have asked for more info, so here we go.
Basically, this new feature uses nanomsg (nng) to implement the SURVEY protocol between workers (nodes) and the front end server. The proxy server will send out MEMBERSHIP and STATUS surveys, that nodes can respond to; thus new nodes can automagically add themselves as they come up as well as remove themselves when they restart or shutdown via MEMBERSHIP. STATUS can be used to provide real-time load on each node, which will be sent via a __packed__ struct, ala NTP and other common usage patterns, in which 32bit fields are converted from endian-ness to network and back. That STATUS info can be used for "intelligent" load balancing and will provide some typical server metrics such as memory, # of cpus, etc...