Operating Systems
Operating Systems Notes: Scheduling Tradeoffs
How fairness, throughput, and latency interact in practical schedulers.
2026-05-10
Modern schedulers are balancing acts.
- Throughput improves with longer time slices.
- Responsiveness improves with shorter time slices.
- Fairness requires explicit accounting.
When evaluating a scheduling policy, I now start with the target workload first instead of picking an algorithm by name.