A Safeguard for Privileged Passwords' cluster delegates platform management tasks (such as password and SSH key check and password and SSH key change) to appliances based on platform task load. The primary appliance performs delegation and evaluates cluster member suitability using an internal fitness score that is calculated by dividing the number of in-use platform task threads by the maximum number of allowed platform task threads.

The maximum number of allowed platform task threads can be adjusted using the Appliance/Settings API and adjusting the MaxPlatformTaskThreads value. By adjusting this number, you can tune task distribution.

Increasing the maximum number of allowed platform task threads will decrease the fitness score thus increasing the number of tasks passed to that appliance.

The fitness score is cached and is recalculated in 8-minute intervals when the scheduler is not busy. When the scheduler is running tasks, the fitness score is calculated more frequently so the scheduler can dynamically adjust.

The selection of a Safeguard for Privileged Sessions Appliance is primarily dependent on managed network rules. However, if there aren't any managed network rules or if the managed network rules result in more than one Safeguard for Privileged Sessions appliances selected, a fitness score is used as the tie breaker. The fitness score is calculated based on the percentage of disk available minus the overall load average of the Safeguard for Privileged Sessions appliance. (Load average is a Linux metric which provides a numerical indication of the overall resource capacity in use on the server.) The higher the fitness score, the more likely that the corresponding appliance will be selected.