Starvation in the context of operating systems, refers to a situation where a particular process or thread does not receive enough resources (such as CPU time, memory, or I/O access) to do its job. This can cause a process to continue to wait for resources forever, despite their availability on the system.

Causes of fasting

  • Task prioritization: In some cases, the operating system may incorrectly allocate resources between processes due to incorrect priority settings or due to scheduling algorithms.
  • Resource locks: If one process holds a lock on a resource, other processes that need that resource may become blocked and starved.
  • Long-running I/O operations: If a process is waiting for a long-running I/O operation (such as reading data from disk) to complete, it may block and not receive enough CPU time to complete other tasks.

Prevention of fasting

Correct setup of the scheduler: One of the key points is the correct setup of process scheduling algorithms. The operating system must take into account the needs of all processes and distribute resources fairly among them.

Using Queues: Using queues to organize access to resources can help avoid starvation. For example, processes may wait their turn to access shared resources.

Performance Monitoring and Analysis: Regularly monitoring system performance allows you to identify potential starvation problems and take steps to prevent them.

Using priorities: Process priorities can be set so that priority processes receive more resources and do not suffer from starvation.

I/O Optimization: Long I/O operations can be optimized using data caching, prefetching, or asynchronous operations.

Starvation in operating systems can seriously degrade system performance and affect application performance. Proper system design and configuration, as well as monitoring system performance, are key steps to prevent starvation and ensure efficient use of resources