Preventing Large Sojourn Times Using SMART Scheduling

Misja Nuyens (), Adam Wierman () and Bert Zwart ()
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Misja Nuyens: Department of Mathematics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Adam Wierman: Computer Science Department, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125
Bert Zwart: H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332

Operations Research, 2008, vol. 56, issue 1, 88-101

Abstract: Recently, the so-called class of SMART scheduling policies has been introduced to formalize the common heuristic of “biasing toward small jobs.” We study the tail of the sojourn-time (response-time) distribution under both SMART policies and the foreground-background policy (FB) in the GI/GI/1 queue. We prove that these policies behave very well under heavy-tailed service times. Specifically, we show that the sojourn-time tail under all SMART policies and FB is similar to that of the service-time tail, up to a constant, which makes the SMART class superior to first-come-first-served (FCFS). In contrast, for light-tailed service times, we prove that the sojourn-time tail under FB and SMART is larger than that under FCFS. However, we show that the sojourn-time tail for a job of size y under FB and all SMART policies still outperforms FCFS as long as y is not too large.

Keywords: queues; priority; limit theorems; probability; stochastic model applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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