idea for load "balancer" with fan-out/ voting

[Paul Mansfield]

just some ideas for discussion...

whilst varnish has been very good at alleviating load by virtue of its
forced caching feature, I was wondering whether it's be possible to have
one request be duplicated to multiple back-end servers and the first one
to reply is used and the others ignored.

you see, if you're using java, the servers might be responding quite
quickly and thus be used in favour of slower servers, but then they hit
garbage collection at some non-deterministic time, and for a very short
while response times become very long.

so if you could duplicate an http request to multiple servers and get
the first response, you'd have to be pretty unlucky for all of them to
be garbage collecting and unresponsive.