Time-Sharing Class

The goal of the time-sharing policy is to provide good response time to interactive processes and good throughput to CPU-bound processes. The scheduler switches CPU allocation often enough to provide good response time, but not so often that the system spends too much time on switching. Time slices are typically a few hundred milliseconds.

The time-sharing policy changes priorities dynamically and assigns time slices of different lengths. The scheduler raises the priority of a process that sleeps after only a little CPU use. For example, a process sleeps when the process starts an I/O operation such as a terminal read or a disk read. Frequent sleeps are characteristic of interactive tasks such as editing and running simple shell commands. The time-sharing policy lowers the priority of a process that uses the CPU for long periods without sleeping.

The time-sharing policy that is the default gives larger time slices to processes with lower priorities. A process with a low priority is likely to be CPU-bound. Other processes get the CPU first, but when a low-priority process finally gets the CPU, that process gets a larger time slice. If a higher-priority process becomes runnable during a time slice, however, the higher-priority process preempts the running process.

Global process priorities and user-supplied priorities are in ascending order: higher priorities run first. The user priority runs from the negative of a configuration-dependent maximum to the positive of that maximum. A process inherits its user priority. Zero is the default initial user priority.

The “user priority limit” is the configuration-dependent maximum value of the user priority. You can set a user priority to any value lower than the user priority limit. With appropriate permission, you can raise the user priority limit. Zero is the user priority limit by default.

You can lower the user priority of a process to give the process reduced access to the CPU. Alternately, with the appropriate permission, raise the user priority to get faster service. The user priority cannot be set to a value that is higher than the user priority limit. Therefore, you must raise the user priority limit before raising the user priority if both have their default values at zero.

An administrator configures the maximum user priority independent of global time-sharing priorities. For example, in the default configuration a user can set a user priority in the –20 to +20 range. However, 60 time-sharing global priorities are configured.

The scheduler manages time-sharing processes by using configurable parameters in the time-sharing parameter table ts_dptbl(4). This table contains information specific to the time-sharing class.