Abstract: This paper presents the design and implementation of a mechanism aimed at enhancing the performance of distributed object-based applications. This goal is achieved by means of a new algorithm implementing placement of method executions that adapts to processors' load and to objects' characteristics, the latter allowing to approximate the cost of methods' remote execution. The behavior of the proposed placement algorithm is examined by providing performance measures obtained from its integration within a customizable distributed object-based runtime system. In particular, the cost of method executions using our algorithm is compared with the cost resulting from the standard placement technique that consists of executing any method on the storing node of its embedding object.