Occasionally there may be a need to “load balance” running jobs across multiple servers. The Argent Job Scheduler provides the following three options, all customizable on a job-by-job basis.

Take for example the needs of a particular financial services company using the Argent Job Scheduler. This particular firm runs over 30,000 jobs per day! Obviously, this kind of load would be too much for just ONE server to handle.

By using job affinities and the Macros facility, this firm load-balances their job execution across a total of 13 Queue Engines. This ensures excellent performance and the utmost in redundancy and reliability.

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First Available Server

This option, as the name implies, means that the first server which has an available queue will process the job.

All Servers Specified Above

This option, as the name implies, will cause a job to be submitted to all Argent Queue Engine servers that are specified. Selecting this option will cause the job to run multiple times if there are multiple available Argent Queue Engines defined in the list.

Least-busy Server (Lowest CPU)

This option allows a job to be submitted to the Argent Queue Engine server with the lowest CPU utilization at the time the job is being submitted.

The Argent Job Scheduler gets the current CPU load for each defined Argent Queue Engine, and then selects the least busy server at the time of job submission.