US Patent 9766960 Workload-driven techniques for providing biased service level guarantees

Techniques and architectures for workload management. A stream of messages is received with servers coupled to provide access to shared system resources. The servers are organized as at least two groups with a first group providing message queuing services and a second group providing message queuing services under first conditions and modified message queuing services under second conditions. Message queuing services are provided with the first group by treating all jobs as equal, processing jobs asynchronously and processing jobs in the background to defer to foreground, non-message queuing services, jobs. Message queuing services are provided with the second group by treating all jobs as equal, processing jobs asynchronously and processing jobs in the background to defer to foreground, non-message queuing services, jobs under the first conditions. Modified message queuing services are provided with the second group by shortest-slack-first scheduling under the second conditions.