Process Scheduling in OS (Operating System)

Operating system uses various schedulers for the process scheduling described below.

1. Long term scheduler

Long term scheduler is also known as job scheduler. It chooses the processes from the pool (secondary memory) and keeps them in the ready queue maintained in the primary memory.

Long Term scheduler mainly controls the degree of Multiprogramming. The purpose of long term scheduler is to choose a perfect mix of IO bound and CPU bound processes among the jobs present in the pool.

If the job scheduler chooses more IO bound processes then all of the jobs may reside in the blocked state all the time and the CPU will remain idle most of the time. This will reduce the degree of Multiprogramming. Therefore, the Job of long term scheduler is very critical and may affect the system for a very long time.

2. Short term scheduler

Short term scheduler is also known as CPU scheduler. It selects one of the Jobs from the ready queue and dispatch to the CPU for the execution.

A scheduling algorithm is used to select which job is going to be dispatched for the execution. The Job of the short term scheduler can be very critical in the sense that if it selects job whose CPU burst time is very high then all the jobs after that, will have to wait in the ready queue for a very long time.

This problem is called starvation which may arise if the short term scheduler makes some mistakes while selecting the job.

3. Medium term scheduler

Medium term scheduler takes care of the swapped out processes.If the running state processes needs some IO time for the completion then there is a need to change its state from running to waiting.

Medium term scheduler is used for this purpose. It removes the process from the running state to make room for the other processes. Such processes are the swapped out processes and this procedure is called swapping. The medium term scheduler is responsible for suspending and resuming the processes.

It reduces the degree of multiprogramming. The swapping is necessary to have a perfect mix of processes in the ready queue.