Which scheduling policy is most suitable for a time shared operating system?
View worked solution
Answer: B
The correct option is B.
A time-shared operating system allows multiple users to share system resources simultaneously. The primary goal of CPU scheduling in such an environment is to provide good responsiveness (low response time) and fairness to all active processes.
- Round Robin (RR): This policy allocates the CPU to each process for a small, fixed time slice (time quantum) in a cyclic manner. This ensures that every process gets a turn regularly, preventing starvation and providing excellent response times for interactive users. Thus, it is the most suitable policy for time-sharing systems.
- Shortest Job First (SJF): While SJF minimizes average waiting time, it requires prior knowledge of CPU burst times (which is impractical for interactive systems) and can cause starvation for longer processes.
- First Come First Serve (FCFS): This is a non-preemptive algorithm that can lead to the convoy effect, where short processes wait a long time for a single long process to finish, resulting in very poor response times.
- Elevator: This is a disk scheduling algorithm (also known as SCAN), not a CPU scheduling policy.
Free practice · Your answers on this page are not saved.