Xref: utzoo comp.arch:19300 comp.unix.questions:26929 comp.unix.internals:1033 comp.unix.admin:536 comp.unix.large:194 comp.unix.misc:560 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!augean!sibyl!ian From: ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ (Ian Dall) Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.internals,comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.large,comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Killer Micro Question Message-ID: <888@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> Date: 15 Nov 90 01:25:14 GMT References: <16364@s.ms.uky.edu> Reply-To: ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) Organization: Engineering, Uni of Adelaide, Australia Lines: 26 In article <16364@s.ms.uky.edu> randy@ms.uky.edu (Randy Appleton) writes: >But how does each user, who is about to log in, know which machine to >log into? He ought to log into the one with the lowest load average, yet >without logging on cannot determine which one that is. I do just that! I have a little shell script called "least-loaded" which grunges through the output of ruptime. So when X starts up it does "rsh `least-loaded ` ...." to start my clients. I also do this when I have a compute bound job to run. The only catch is that all servers need to be capable of running your job. We have several servers set up with NFS cross mounting so they are *almost* identical. You can get caught out sometimes though. Also, NFS imposes an additional overhead. Running a compute bound process this way is fine, running an IO bound process this way might be a bad idea if the disk it accesses is physically on another server. In short, I think it is a good idea, but it needs a more efficient distributed file system before I would want to release it on Joe User. It would be really nice to have a distributed OS which was able to migrate IO bound processes to minimise network traffic and migrate cpu bound processes to the least loaded machine. Dream on! -- Ian Dall life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts some people more severely than others.