Part of this work has been presented in [17]. This paper analyzes the performances of portable distributed priority queues by examining the theoretical features required and by comparing various implementations. In spite of intrinsic bottlenecks and induced hot-spots, we argue that tree topologies are attractive to manage the natural centralized control required for the deletemin operation in order to detect the site which holds the item with the largest priority. We introduce an original perfect balancing to cope with the load variation due to the priority queue operations which continuously modify the overall number of items in the network. For comparison, we introduce the d-heap and the binomial distributed priority queue. The purpose of this experiment is to convey, through executions on Cray-T3D and MeikoT800, an understanding of the nature of the distributed priority queues, the range of their concurrency and a comparison of their efficiency to reduce requests latency. In particu...