Process Migration and Load Balancing in Amoeba

This paper reports our experience in adding process migration to the distributed operating system Amoeba, and the results of a series of experiments to evaluate its usefulness for load balancing. After describing our design goals, we present our implementation for Amoeba, and performance figures which indicate that the speed of process migration is limited only by the throughput of the network adapters used in our configuration. We also present load balancing results showing that process migration can make a substantial improvement to the performance of a distributed system.