A high availability environment of resource adapters implements processes to manage and to distribute work among the adapters or adapter instances. An input resource, such as a file, is received and tasks are created to distribute the content to the different instances of the adapters that are configured in the cluster. A resource adapter instance switches to manage the creation of the task based on task-definitions of the adapter. The task-definitions are rules specified in the adapter on chunks of data. The tasks are created such that chunks of data are independently locked and processed without duplication. In order to distribute the work, the tasks are persisted into a table/xml on a persistent disk. The remaining instances interact with the table to access the tasks specified by the entries in the table, thus executing the tasks.