Abstract. This paper proposes and presents a comparison of scheduling algorithms applied to the context of load balancing the query traffic on distributed inverted files. We put emphasis on queries requiring intersection of posting lists, which is a very demanding case for the term partitioned inverted file and a case in which the document partitioned inverted file used by current search engines can perform very efficiently. We show that with proper scheduling of queries the term partitioned approach can outperform the document partitioned approach.