[LCP]round-robin

[Bill Rausch]

At 2:36 AM +0200 10/3/01, Nicola ONOSE wrote:
>   I know it sounds a little silly, but I received a description of
>a round-robin implementation and it is based on terms
>like "arrival time", "service time".
>  I can guess their meaning, but I am not very sure, so I would
>appreciate some help from anybody.

Just from that brief description, it sounds like you need to find a 
reference on "queuing theory".  Think of customers at a checkout 
counter:
   they arrive at random intervals (simulated with a probability distribution),
   they take random amounts of time to service (simulated by a different
		probability distribution)

The usual studies in the textbooks will discuss how you can simulate 
this sort of thing, including multiple checkout counters, etc.

In computer science, queues are used all over the place (printers, 
etc. being the most obvious, but also inside disk drives, for 
multiple execution streams at differing priorities, ...)

-- 
  Bill Rausch, Software Development, Unix, Mac, Windows
  Numerical Applications, Inc.  509-943-0861   bill at numerical.com