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 it 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 (a process sleeps, for example, when it 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 default time-sharing policy 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, it gets a bigger chunk of time. If a higher-priority process becomes runnable during a time slice, however, it preempts the running process.

Global process priorities and user-supplied priorities are in ascending order: numerically 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 below the user priority limit. With appropriate permission, you can raise the user priority limit. Zero is the default user priority limit.

You can lower the user priority of a process to give the process reduced access to the CPU or, with the appropriate permission, raise the user priority to get better service. Because you cannot set the user priority above the user priority limit, you must raise the user priority limit before you raise the user priority, if both have their default values at zero.

An administrator configures the maximum user priority independent of global time-sharing priorities. In the default configuration, for example, a user can set a user priority only in the range from -20 to +20, but 60 time-sharing global priorities are configured.

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