FSCAN is a disk scheduling algorithm to determine the motion of the disk's arm and head in servicing read and write requests. It uses two sub-queues. During the scan, all of the requests are in the first queue and all new requests are put into the second queue. Thus, service of new requests is deferred until all of the old requests have been processed. When the scan ends, the arm is taken to the first queue entries and is started all over again.
FSCAN along with N-Step-SCAN prevents "arm stickiness" unlike SSTF, SCAN, and C-SCAN. Arm stickiness in those other algorithms occurs when a stream of requests for the same track causes the disk arm to stop progressing at that track, preferring to satisfy the no-seek requests for the track it is on. Because FSCAN separates requests into two queues, with new requests going into a waiting queue, the arm continues its sweep to the outer track and is therefore not "sticky." There is an obvious trade-off in that the requests in the waiting queue must wait longer to be fulfilled, but in exchange FSCAN is more fair to all requests.
There can be multiple variations of this algorithm. Instead of using just 2 queues, one can use N queues (with N greater than 2). The benefit of using N queues is there would be limited number of entries in a given queue and hence the reference string queue would take lesser time to get completed. Hence, the queues will get swiped faster which in turn improves the responding time of algorithm (refer to See Also section).
Other variations include:
In computing, a context switch is the process of storing the state of a process or thread, so that it can be restored and resume execution at a later point. This allows multiple processes to share a single central processing unit (CPU), and is an essential feature of a multitasking operating system.
Flood fill, also called seed fill, is an algorithm that determines and alters the area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array with some matching attribute. It is used in the "bucket" fill tool of paint programs to fill connected, similarly-colored areas with a different color, and in games such as Go and Minesweeper for determining which pieces are cleared. A variant called boundary fill uses the same algorithms but is defined as the area connected to a given node that does not have a particular attribute.
Latency from a general point of view is a time delay between the cause and the effect of some physical change in the system being observed. Lag, as it is known in gaming circles, refers to the latency between the input to a simulation and the visual or auditory response, often occurring because of network delay in online games.
In computer science, a priority queue is an abstract data type similar to a regular queue or stack data structure in which each element additionally has a "priority" associated with it. In a priority queue, an element with high priority is served before an element with low priority. In some implementations, if two elements have the same priority, they are served according to the order in which they were enqueued, while in other implementations, ordering of elements with the same priority is undefined.
In technology, response time is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input.
In computer, scheduling is the action of assigning resources to perform tasks. The resources may be processors, network links or expansion cards. The tasks may be threads, processes or data flows.
Round-robin (RR) is one of the algorithms employed by process and network schedulers in computing. As the term is generally used, time slices are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority. Round-robin scheduling is simple, easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can be applied to other scheduling problems, such as data packet scheduling in computer networks. It is an operating system concept.
In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking implementations. A non-blocking algorithm is lock-free if there is guaranteed system-wide progress, and wait-free if there is also guaranteed per-thread progress. "Non-blocking" was used as a synonym for "lock-free" in the literature until the introduction of obstruction-freedom in 2003.
In a computer operating system that uses paging for virtual memory management, page replacement algorithms decide which memory pages to page out, sometimes called swap out, or write to disk, when a page of memory needs to be allocated. Page replacement happens when a requested page is not in memory and a free page cannot be used to satisfy the allocation, either because there are none, or because the number of free pages is lower than some threshold.
In computing, cache algorithms are optimizing instructions, or algorithms, that a computer program or a hardware-maintained structure can utilize in order to manage a cache of information stored on the computer. Caching improves performance by keeping recent or often-used data items in memory locations that are faster or computationally cheaper to access than normal memory stores. When the cache is full, the algorithm must choose which items to discard to make room for the new ones.
The MCP is the operating system of the Burroughs small, medium and large systems, including the Unisys Clearpath/MCP systems.
The leaky bucket is an algorithm based on an analogy of how a bucket with a constant leak will overflow if either the average rate at which water is poured in exceeds the rate at which the bucket leaks or if more water than the capacity of the bucket is poured in all at once. It can be used to determine whether some sequence of discrete events conforms to defined limits on their average and peak rates or frequencies, e.g. to limit the actions associated to these events to these rates or delay them until they do conform to the rates. It may also be used to check conformance or limit to an average rate alone, i.e. remove any variation from the average.
The elevator algorithm is a disk-scheduling algorithm to determine the motion of the disk's arm and head in servicing read and write requests.
In computer science, the readers–writers problems are examples of a common computing problem in concurrency. There are at least three variations of the problems, which deal with situations in which many concurrent threads of execution try to access the same shared resource at one time.
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) is a technology built into certain ATA and SCSI hard drives. It allows the operating system to send multiple read and write requests to a hard drive. ATA TCQ is not identical in function to the more efficient Native Command Queuing (NCQ) used by SATA drives. SCSI TCQ does not suffer from the same limitations as ATA TCQ.
N-Step-SCAN is a disk scheduling algorithm to determine the motion of the disk's arm and head in servicing read and write requests. It segments the request queue into subqueues of length N. Breaking the queue into segments of N requests makes service guarantees possible. Subsequent requests entering the request queue won't get pushed into N sized subqueues which are already full by the elevator algorithm. As such, starvation is eliminated and guarantees of service within N requests is possible.
Input/output (I/O) scheduling is the method that computer operating systems use to decide in which order the block I/O operations will be submitted to storage volumes. I/O scheduling is sometimes called disk scheduling.
LOOK is a disk scheduling algorithm used to determine the order in which new disk read and write requests are processed.
A process is a program in execution. An integral part of any modern-day operating system (OS). The OS must allocate resources to processes, enable processes to share and exchange information, protect the resources of each process from other processes and enable synchronization among processes. To meet these requirements, the OS must maintain a data structure for each process, which describes the state and resource ownership of that process, and which enables the OS to exert control over each process.
A bucket queue is a data structure that implements the priority queue abstract data type: it maintains a dynamic collection of elements with numerical priorities and allows quick access to the element with minimum priority. In the bucket queue, the priorities must be integers, and it is particularly suited to applications in which the priorities have a small range. A bucket queue has the form of an array of buckets: an array data structure, indexed by the priorities, whose cells contain collections of items with the same priority as each other. With this data structure, insertion of elements and changes of their priority take constant time. Searching for and removing the minimum-priority element takes time proportional to the number of buckets or, by maintaining a pointer to the most recently found bucket, in time proportional to the difference in priorities between successive operations.