Migration impact on load balancing—an experience on Amoeba
Weiping Zhu, Piotr Socko, Bartek Kiepuszewski · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1997
Load balancing has been extensive study by simulation, positive results were received in most of the researches. With the increase of the availability of distributed systems, a few experiments have been carried out on different systems. These experimental studies either depend on task initiation or task initiation plus task migration. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental study of load balancing using a centralized policy to manage the load on a set of processors. All experiments were carried out on an Amoeba system composed by a set of 386s and linked by 10Mbps Ethernet. The results on one hand indicate the necessity of a load balancing facility for a distributed system. On the other hand, the results question the impact of using process migration to increase system performance under the configuration used in our experiments.