Analysis of Round-Robin Implementations of Processor Sharing, Including Overhead

—It has been observed in recent years that in many applications service time demands are highly variable. Without foreknowledge of exact service times of individual jobs, processor sharing is an effective theoretical strategy for handling such demands. In practice, however, processor sharing must be implemented by time-slicing with a round-robin discipline. In this paper, we investigate how round-robin performs with the consideration of job switching overhead. Because of recent results, we assume that the best strategy is for new jobs to preempt the one in service. By analyzing time-slicing with overhead, we derive the effective utilization parameter, and give a good approximation regarding the lower bound of time-slice under a given system load and overhead. The simulation results show that for both exponential and non-exponential distributions, the system blowup points agree with what the effective utilization parameter tells us. Furthermore, with the consideration of overhead, an ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: NCA
• Authors: Steve Thompson, Lester Lipsky, Sarah Tasneem, Feng Zhang
• Keywords: Effective Utilization Parameter, NCA 2009, Network Computing, Processor Sharing, Service Times