load sharing

[Root Boy Jim]

In article <25860 at adm.brl.mil> pjw at usna.navy.mil, , jw at math30, (Peter J. Welcher (math FACULTY)) writes:
>
>The question is, is there any easy way to perform load-sharing, other than by
>randomly assigning sections or students to hosts ?  

Someone (I believe it is Apollo) has introduced the concept of a "broker",
to complement the concepts of "clients" and "servers". Brokers locate
the latter for the former when location is immaterial.

>I've written a C program that forks (to get around timeout delays) and then
>does rstat calls. It is called "loaddist".

So far, so good.

>It kills processes that don't finish within a short time, and

Probably a bad idea, unless you have lots of runaway processes.

>then prints the name of the least loaded host (with some other fudge factors
>thrown into the calculation, like Sun 3 vs. SPARC). 
>My idea was to have "rlogin `loaddist`" done to the students when they
>log into the specified host, math3. Is this a good/bad idea ?
>
>An alternative would be to set "loaddist" up as a daemon

Sounds like rwho, now doesn't it?

>Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Do you have NFS? Devote a directory on a common filesystem to
load status monitoring. Some people have fixed rwho so that it
merely writes info to a file in the rwho directory. Thus, the
broadcast rwho traffic turns into NFS traffic all destined for
wherever the real directory resides.
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