  We analyse Join-the-Shortest-Queue in a contemporary scaling regime known as
the Non-Degenerate Slowdown regime. Join-the-Shortest-Queue (JSQ) is a
classical load balancing policy for queueing systems with multiple parallel
servers. Parallel server queueing systems are regularly analysed and
dimensioned by diffusion approximations achieved in the Halfin-Whitt scaling
regime. However, when jobs must be dispatched to a server upon arrival, we
advocate the Non-Degenerate Slowdown regime (NDS) to compare different
load-balancing rules.
  In this paper we identify novel diffusion approximation and timescale
separation that provides insights into the performance of JSQ. We calculate the
price of irrevocably dispatching jobs to servers and prove this to within 15%
(in the NDS regime) of the rules that may manoeuvre jobs between servers. We
also compare ours results for the JSQ policy with the NDS approximations of
many modern load balancing policies such as Idle-Queue-First and
Power-of-$d$-choices policies which act as low information proxies for the JSQ
policy. Our analysis leads us to construct new rules that have identical
performance to JSQ but require less communication overhead than
power-of-2-choices.
