Load Balancing

Audience: operators running multiple EventMesh instances, and anyone wondering how traffic spreads across a cluster without peer forwarding. Part of the offset / load-balancing / frame design trio; see also Offset management.

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Architectural position

Balancing happens at the session-assignment layer (the recommend entry point), not at the pull/dispatch layer.

Each instance pulls — passively, on demand — only for the clients it serves. No peer-to-peer pull, no forwarding. First balance which client belongs to which instance (the session layer); each instance's pull volume then roughly follows — instead of "pull equally everywhere, then balance the dispatch".

The full-stickiness model

Old model (retired):                       New model (full stickiness):
  PartitionOwnership (partition%n)            × no partition ownership
  ClusterCoordinator (cross-instance fwd)     × no forwarding
  HttpForwarder (HTTP forward to peer)        × no forwarding
  ClusterSubscriptionStore (cluster subs)     × local subscriptions

enableCluster keeps only:
  ClusterMembership (heartbeat + load metrics)   feeds /session/recommend scoring

The forwarding classes (PartitionOwnership / ClusterCoordinator / HttpForwarder) are retained but unused (reserve + tests).

Zero client burden — instances self-report load

Instances collect their own load metrics locally (LoadMeter); clients never report anything.

Metric	Source
activeSessions	SessionRouter sinks / subscribeSinks size
inflowBytes/s	UniIngressService publish byte counters (bucketed per clientId → per-client traffic profile)
outflowBytes/s	SSE / poll egress byte counters
cpuLoad	OperatingSystemMXBean

These are written with the existing 5 s heartbeat into /em/instances/<id> = <ts>|<addr>|<activeSessions>|<byteRate>|<cpuLoad>.

The balancing loop

① client first connects to any instance
   │
② GET /session/recommend?clientId=xxx
   │ → that instance reads the cluster-wide /em/instances/ (all instances + load)
   │ → score = activeSessions×w1 + byteRate×w2 + cpuLoad×w3
   │ → overload feedback: cpuLoad>0.8 or inflow>5MB/s → score += 10000 (yield)
   │ → big-client spreading: check the client's existing session spread; prefer not-yet-saturated instances
   │
③ returns the recommended instanceUrl
   │
④ POST /session/open → {sessionId, agentId, instanceUrl}
   │ → the SDK pins subsequent turn/close to that instance
   │
⑤ POST /events/subscribe → {subscriptionId, instanceUrl}
   │ → the SDK pins subsequent poll/ack to that instance
   │
⑥ all further requests go straight to that instance
   │ → instances pull only for their own clients; no peers, no forwarding
   │
⑦ failure / instance unreachable → the SDK re-fetches /session/recommend for another instance

Session-granularity stickiness

• /session/open and /events/subscribe both return instanceUrl.
• SDK SessionHandle.instanceUrl → StreamingSession uses client.withBaseUrl(instanceUrl) to pin subsequent turn/close.
• SDK subscribe → capturePollInstance sets pollBaseUrl; subsequent poll+ack go to that instance.
• advertisedAddr defaults to empty (single-instance / tests / LB-compatible); set -Deventmesh.http.advertisedAddr=host:port to enable pinning.

The costs (accepted trade-offs)

• No forwarding ⇒ subscribers must be sticky (otherwise a poll landing on a different instance sees nothing) — guaranteed by subscribe→instanceUrl.
• Multiple subscribers of one topic spread across instances ⇒ each instance pulls every partition (MQ read amplification: N instances = N reads) — the price paid to eliminate the forwarding hop and global coordination complexity.
• A single session whose traffic exceeds one instance's ceiling cannot be split → the instance rate-limits/rejects — a known boundary with no workaround.

Where the code lives

Piece	Location
Load meter	eventmesh-runtime/.../ingress/LoadMeter.java
Cluster membership / heartbeat	eventmesh-runtime/.../cluster/ClusterMembership.java
Recommend scoring	UniIngressService (/session/recommend)
Session routing	eventmesh-runtime/.../session/SessionRouter.java, Matchmaker.java
SDK pinning	eventmesh-sdks/.../cloudevents/ (capturePollInstance, SessionHandle)
Tests	ClusterMembershipLoadTest, LoadMeterTest, LoadBalancingScoringTest