I don’t think that you can send a socket, because that is backed by an underlying OS socket, and that cannot be sent over. But:
- if you control the protocol, you could implement a redirect, or just “hang up” from nodes that are too busy and wait for the client to reconnect
- You usually receive data to do something with it. Reading a socket, doing basic framing/cleanup, and sending the result elsewhere for processing is very lightweight. So you may not really care about load balancing, because your acceptor could be so lightweight that you just don’t care. Databases, transcoding, whatever, go to dedicated compute nodes.
It really depends on what you want/need to do.
