We consider the power-of-two policy with d = 2, Poisson job arrivals, heterogeneous servers and a general job requirement distribution. With the help of the first two light traffic derivatives for the average job response time, we point to interesting structural features associated with server heterogeneity in light traffic.

We study a multi-class time-sharing discipline with relative priorities known as Discriminatory Processor Sharing (DPS), which provides a natural framework to model service differentiation in systems. The analysis of DPS is extremely challenging and analytical results are scarce. We develop closedform approximations for the mean conditional and unconditional sojourn times. The main benefits of the approximations lie in its simplicity, the fact that it applies for general service requirements with finite second moments, and that it provides insights into the dependency of the performance on the system parameters. We show that the approximation for the mean (un)conditional sojourn time of a customer is decreasing as its relative priority increases. We also show that the approximation is exact in various scenarios, and that it is uniformly bounded in the second moments of the service requirements. Finally we numerically illustrate that the approximation is accurate across a broad range of parameters.

We study the steady-state queue-length vector in a multi-class queue with relative priorities. Upon service completion, the probability that the next served customer is from class k is controlled by class-dependent weights. Once a customer has started service, it is served without interruption until completion. We establish a state-space collapse for the scaled queue-length vector in the heavy-traffic regime, that is, in the limit the scaled queue-length vector is distributed as the product of an exponentially distributed random variable and a deterministic vector. We observe that the scaled queue length reduces as classes with smaller mean service requirement obtain relatively larger weights. We finally show that the scaled waiting time of a class-k customer is distributed as the product of two exponentially distributed random variables.