We consider a distributed asynchronous system where processes can only communicate by message passing and need a coherent view of the load (e.g., workload, memory) of others to take dynamic decisions (scheduling). We present several mechanisms to obtain a distributed view of such information, based either on maintaining that view or demand-driven with a snapshot algorithm. We perform an experimental study in the context of a real application, an asynchronous parallel solver for large sparse systems of linear equations.