Patent ID: 7730185

Claim:
In a computer system including a set of resources for allocation to, and access by, a plurality of consumers, a method for allocating a resource to a requesting consumer, the method comprising: calculating a suitability rating by a resource allocator executing on a central processor unit on said computer system for each of the resource in the set of resources as a value in a range from least suitable to most suitable, the suitability rating being calculated from: a) a measure of a recency of access to the resource resulting from a subtraction of a previous global activity count from a global activity count; b) a measure of a number of times the resource has been accessed by a consumer other than the requesting consumer since a previous access to the resource by the requesting consumer resulting from a subtraction of a pervious resource usage count from a resource usage count; and c) a measure of a number of times the resource is accessed by a different consumer since the previous access to the resource by the requesting consumer resulting from a subtraction of a pervious resource consumer change count from a consumer change count; identifying the resource by said resource allocator having the suitability rating which is closest to most suitable; and allocating the identified resource by said resource allocator communicatively connected by a computer network to the requesting consumer.