Load balancing (computing): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:36, 17 June 2025

Revision as of 09:37, 17 June 2025

Line 30:

A load balancing algorithm is "static" when it does not take into account the state of the system for the distribution of tasks. Thereby, the system state includes measures such as the [[Load (computing)|load level]] (and sometimes even overload) of certain processors. Instead, assumptions about the overall system are made beforehand, such as the arrival times and resource requirements of incoming tasks. In addition, the number of processors, their respective power and communication speeds are known. Therefore, static load balancing aims to associate a known set of tasks with the available processors in order to minimize a certain performance function. The trick lies in the concept of this performance function.

Static load balancing techniques are commonly centralized around a router, or [[Master/slave (technology)|Mastermaster]], which distributes the loads and optimizes the performance function. This minimization can take into account information related to the tasks to be distributed, and derive an expected execution time.

The advantage of static algorithms is that they are easy to set up and extremely efficient in the case of fairly regular tasks (such as processing [[HTTP]] requests from a website). However, there is still some statistical variance in the assignment of tasks which can lead to the overloading of some computing units.