Busy Period Analysis of a Time-Sharing System
Richard E. Nance, U. Narayan Bhat, Billy G. Claybrook · Journal of the ACM · 1972
Analytical results in terms of Laplace-Stieltjes transforms for the busy period distribution of a time-sharing system with a central processing unit (CPU) and N peripheral units are derived in an earlier paper by Bhat and Nance.Assumptions of the model are that job arrivals are Poisson, required processing time for each job is an independent exponential random variable, and a feedback type discipline governs CPU access.The steady-state results of the earlier work are extended to gain information about the transient behavior of the CPU, Approximate results for the busy period distribution function are presented through numerical inversion of the transforms.Using these results qualitative conclusions are drawn regarding the sensitivity of system performance to changes in the number of peripheral units, quantum size, and CPU capability.