Suppose that a machine succeeds fast, not fails fast. Say a machine's job is to run N things on its input, and the identities of these N things are picked up fr

Suppose that a machine succeeds fast, not fails fast. Say a machine's job is to run N things on its input, and the identities of these N things are picked up from configuration somewhere. One machine gets a corrupted config somehow, and has only 1 thing to run. The others are running 10 things. So one machine is (barring framework/networking/etc. overhead) 10x faster than the rest, and it thinks it's doing fine. Now even if your mind is stuck on HTTP, you have to think about the same problem but with 200 response codes. Still a non-issue? And what if the responses are opaque to the LB? TCP-level load balancing, maybe? There are reasons you might choose that. Or maybe the protocol you use is not HTTP-based and you don't have a way to teach your LB about it.