Re:The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)
by seandavidfisher on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @11:05AM
(#30601428)
The author addressed this in the comments.
> What’s to prevent the system from bouncing between “1 task in processor & 1 task in queue” and “1 task in processor & 2 tasks in queue” while maintaining 100% utilization?
> Nothing! That could totally happen in a queueing system. However, the arrival process would need to be tuned quite precisely to the processing rate. You would need to watch the status of the processor and, when a task finishes, only then insert a new task into the queue. But this implies a shell game: if you always have a task ready to put into the queue when it needs to be padded back out, then isn’t that task in a sense already “queued”?
> Instead, in queueing theory we usually assume a random arrival process: sometimes a minute may pass between arrivals into the queue; sometimes only a second. So the system can’t bounce for arbitrarily long between 1-in-queue and 2-in-queue states. Eventually, one of two things will randomly occur:
> 1. From the 1-in-queue state, the active task finishes processing before a new task arrives, bringing queue size to 0.
> 2. From the 2-in-queue state, a new task arrives in the queue before the active task finishes, causing the queue size to grow to 3.
> What’s to prevent the system from bouncing between “1 task in processor & 1 task in queue” and “1 task in processor & 2 tasks in queue” while maintaining 100% utilization?
> Nothing! That could totally happen in a queueing system. However, the arrival process would need to be tuned quite precisely to the processing rate. You would need to watch the status of the processor and, when a task finishes, only then insert a new task into the queue. But this implies a shell game: if you always have a task ready to put into the queue when it needs to be padded back out, then isn’t that task in a sense already “queued”?
> Instead, in queueing theory we usually assume a random arrival process: sometimes a minute may pass between arrivals into the queue; sometimes only a second. So the system can’t bounce for arbitrarily long between 1-in-queue and 2-in-queue states. Eventually, one of two things will randomly occur:
> 1. From the 1-in-queue state, the active task finishes processing before a new task arrives, bringing queue size to 0.
> 2. From the 2-in-queue state, a new task arrives in the queue before the active task finishes, causing the queue size to grow to 3.