Deadlock detection scheduling is an important, yet oft-overlooked problem that can significantly affect the overall performance of deadlock handling. An excessive initiation of deadlock detection increases overall message usage, resulting in degraded system performance in the absence of deadlocks; while a deficient initiation of deadlock detection increases the deadlock persistence time, resulting in an increased deadlock resolution cost in the presence of deadlocks. Such a performance tradeoff, however, is generally missing in literature. In this paper we study the impact of deadlock detection scheduling on the system performance, and show that there exists an optimal deadlock detection frequency that yields the minimum long-run mean average cost associated with the message complexity of deadlock detection and resolution algorithms, and the rate of deadlock formation, λ. Based on the up-to-date deadlock detection and resolution algorithms, we show that the asymptotically optimal...