A Dynamic Load Balancing Algorithm for Stable Pushing of Docker Images in Nginx

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, a wide variety of deep learning models have emerged across various fields. Nevertheless, the quality of these models varies significantly, making the effective evaluation of model performance a pressing issue. In some open data competitions, remote evaluation based on Docker images has increasingly become a novel and reliable approach, providing a consistent environment to ensure the fairness of model evaluations. However, it imposes high demands on hardware resources, typically requiring dedicated resources for each participant to serve as Docker Registries for the pushing and management of Docker images. In this paper, we extend the load balancing module of the Nginx server by integrating Lua scripts and propose a Cache-based Dynamic Smooth Weighted Round-robin (CDSWRR) algorithm to optimize the pushing process of Docker images. By constructing a unified load balancing entry, the proposed approach simplifies the deployment of Docker Registry clusters. Experiments show that compared to weighted round-robin and IP hash algorithms of Nginx, the CDSWRR algorithm is able to ensure stable pushing of Docker images and reduce both response error rate and response time.