Load-balancing heuristics and process behavior

Dynamic load balancing in a system of loosely-coupled homogeneous processors may employ both judicious initial placement of processes and migration of existing processes to processors with fewer resident processes. In order to predict the possible benefits of these dynamic assignment techniques, we analyzed the behavior (CPU, disk, and memory use) of 9.5 million Unix* processes during normal use. The observed process behavior was then used to drive simulation studies of particular dynamic assignment heuristics.Let F(·) be the probability distribution of the amount of CPU time used by an arbitrary process. In the environment studied we found: (1-F(x)) n rx-c, 1.05