Arguably, one of the most important characteristics of a load balancer is to have extremely low latency. If you're balancing loads, you want to be very quick a

Arguably, one of the most important characteristics of a load balancer is to have extremely low latency. If you're balancing loads, you want to be very quick about making a decision. When generating predictions about the computational cost, that can itself add in a computational cost that might result in a non-negligible amount of computational cost overhead. Inherently, the idea that you're talking about boils down to having a way to characterize the nature of the request flows in such a manner that they can be evenly distributed. The ideal way to characterize them then, would be to know this information beforehand such that it does not require any computation at all to normalize the costs. As such, the best strategy would be to actually segregate traffic flows such that they're forwarded to "dumb" load balancers that use one of the strategies from TFA like weighted round robin. Of course, there are many such optimizations available, but TFA seems to be targeting a beginner level introduction to a rather complex topic. As you describe, load balancing and scheduling algorithms have a pretty high overlap in terms of their theoretical foundations, and these concepts manifest themselves throughout any large scale system.