COMPARISON OF DYNAMIC AND STATIC LOAD-BALANCING STRATEGIES IN HETEROGENEOUS DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Although dynamic load-balancing strategies have the potential of perfo rming better than static strategies, they are inevitably more complex. Their complexity and the overheads involved may negate their benefits . A heterogeneous distributed system, with computers of different proc essing capability but the same functionality, has been examined for tw o dynamic and two static policies. The results show that both the dyna mic and the static policies provide dramatic performance improvements. However, they show that, contrary to common belief, the performance p rovided by the static policies is not much inferior to that provided b y the dynamic policies. Furthermore, if the overheads in load balancin g are not negligibly small, static policies are more stable and can of fer better performance than dynamic policies.