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Saturday, June 15, 2013

What is CPU Scheduling Criteria?

Scheduling is an essential concept that serves in the multitasking, multiprocessor and distributed systems. There are several schedulers available for this purpose. But these schedulers also require a criterion up on which they can decide how to schedule the processes. In this article we discuss about these scheduling criteria. Today a number of scheduling algorithms are available and all these have different properties. This is why these may work up on different scheduling criteria. Also the chosen algorithm may favor one class of processes more than the other.

What Criteria is used by algorithms for Scheduling?


Below mentioned are some of the criteria used by these algorithms for scheduling:
1. CPU utilization:
- It is a property of a good system to keep the CPU as busy as possible all the time.
- Thus, this utilization ranges from 0 percent to 100 percent.
- However, in the systems that are loaded lightly, the range is around 40 percent and for the systems heavily loaded it ranges around 90 percent.

2. Throughput:
- The work is said to be done if the CPU is busy with the execution of the processes.
- Throughput is one measure of CPU performance and can be defined as the number of processes being executed completely in a certain unit of time.
- For example, in short transactions throughput might range around like 10 processes per second.
- In longer transactions this may range around only one process being executed in one hour.

3. Turnaround time:
- This is an important criterion from the point of view of a process.
- This tells how much time the processor has taken for execution of  a processor.
- The turnaround time can be defined as the time duration elapsed from the submission of the process till its completion.

4. Waiting time:
- The amount of time taken for the process for its completion is not affected by the CPU scheduling algorithms.
- Rather, these algorithms only affects the time when the process is in waiting state.
- The time for which the process waits is called the waiting time.

5. Response time:
- The turnaround is not a good criterion in all the situations.
- The response time is favorable in the case of the interactive systems.
- It happens many a times that a process is able to produce the output in a fairly short time compared to the expected time.
- This process then can continue with the next instructions.
- The time taken for a process from its submission till production of the first response is calculated as the response time and is another criterion for the CPU scheduling algorithms.

All these are the primary performance criteria out of which one or more can be selected by a typical CPU scheduler. These criteria might be ranked by the scheduler depending up on their importance. One common problem in the selection of performance criteria is the possibility of conflict ion between them.
For example, increasing the number of active processes will increase the CPU utilization but at the same time will decrease the response time. This is often desirable to produce reduction in waiting time and turnaround time also. In a number of cases the average measure is optimized. But there are certain cases also where it is more beneficial to optimize the maximum or the minimum values.
It is not necessary that a scheduling algorithm that maximizes the throughput will decrease the turnaround time. Out of a mix of short and long jobs, if a scheduler runs only the short jobs, it will produce the best throughput. But at the same time the turnaround time for the long jobs will be so high which is not desirable.


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