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Random routing is more or less industry standard. NGINX and ELB (what I would consider two gold standards for load balancing) both use Round Robin (non-inteligent, pseudo-random) routing variants:

- http://wiki.nginx.org/LoadBalanceExample

- http://serverfault.com/questions/537450/what-algorithm-does-...

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Round Robbin is certainly not equivalent to random, and is much much better for most applications. If all the requests take about the same amount of time, then round Robbin will give the request to the one that hasnt received a request in the longest amount of time, which is clearly the best choice in this situation. Randomized has a 1/n chance of handing the request to this less busy node, which is why the problem becomes worse as you scale.

The issue with round robin routing is that you can't do it in a distributed routing mesh. You need to share state between routers and that coordination overhead is non-trivial.

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