the present invention provides a method of preventing harmful variability and oscillation in weight based , dynamic load balancing environments . more specifically , the present invention relates to methods to effectively determine the magnitude of weight changes in dynamic load balancing environments based on the workload magnitude and server farm capacity . this method depends on the development of new multi - system characteristics such as a relative workload metric to characterize the workload of the system relative to the collective capacity of all of the systems to handle the workload .