A least flow-time first load sharing approach for distributed server farm

This paper proposes a size-based approach, called the least flow-time first (LFF-SIZE), which reduces the delay caused by size variation while maintaining a balanced load in the system. LFF-SIZE takes the relative processing time of a task into account and dynamically assigns a task to the fittest server with a lighter load and higher processing capacity. LFF-SIZE also uses a multi-section queue to separate larger tasks from smaller ones. This arrangement effectively reduces the delay of smaller tasks by larger ones as small tasks are given a higher priority to be processed. The performance results performed on the LFF-SIZE implementation shows a substantial improvement over existing load sharing and static size-based approaches under realistic heavy-tailed workloads.