Patent ID: 6965930

Claim:
A method of distributing workload between data processing systems executing an application which communicates over a network, the method comprising: receiving a request for a connection to the application over the network; obtaining workload information for the data processing systems; obtaining network quality of service information associated with communications over the network for respective ones of the data processing systems; generating workload metrics associated with respective ones of the data processing systems utilizing the workload information and the corresponding network quality of service information for the data processing systems; distributing the requested connection to instances of the application executing on the data processing systems based on the generated workload metrics; wherein the workload information comprises a weight value (W) corresponding to a data processing systems processing capacity; wherein the network quality of service information comprises a loss weight (F-loss) based on packet loss ratio, a network timeout weight (F-timeout) based on a network timeout ratio and a connection weight (F-con) based on a number of active connections; determining a value for F-loss by mapping a TCP loss ratio to the value for F-loss; determining a value for F-timeout by mapping a timeout loss ratio to the value for F-timeout; determining a value for F-conn by determining if a number of current connections exceed a predefined percentage of a total number of allowed connections and setting F-con to 1 if the total number of connections exceeds the predefined percentage of the total number of allowed connections of the total number of allowed connections; and wherein generating workload metrics comprises evaluating the equation: Aw =(1−MIN(1 ,F -loss+timeout+ F -con)* W where Aw is the workload metric.