Support gateway peer load balancing in the new fabric peer gateway connector

[davidkel]

trafficstars

Please share the technical limitation of Caliper that you encountered.

https://github.com/hyperledger/caliper/issues/1205 implements a base connector but one of the points of interest will be how can performance be improved from a client application if you can load balance the calls to multiple gateways.

Please detail your feature idea that could alleviate the limitation.

The connector could be told about multiple peers that can act as gateway peers and perform a round robin load balancing action to determine the benefit of adding more gateways peers to an organisation's network.

Please share some details about your use case if possible, and how the new feature would make Caliper a better performance benchmarking framework.

This will provide a built in mechanism into caliper that would allow a user to experiment with the number of gateway peers to see the effect and help to plan a network.

Please share any suggestions about the new feature's code/configuration API (using formatted YAML segments or pseudo-code).

The format was already described in https://github.com/hyperledger/caliper/issues/1205 where more than 1 peer can be added to a network config file. This feature request will exploit that whereas the base connector would only use the first peer.

It should also be possible to do the same if multiple peers are defined in a connection profile whereas the base implementation would only use the first one it found.

[davidkel]

A roundrobin mechanism is the simplest, but it may be good to also support weighting as well so we can control load distribution

[davidkel]

this may be of interest https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/load-balancing.md https://grpc.io/blog/grpc-load-balancing/

[leonardotkimura]

I agree! I am investigating the effect of new peers in the same organization, and this feature would be useful!