Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
11th Systems Administration Conference (LISA '97)

Adaptive Locks For Frequently Scheduled Tasks With Unpredictable Runtimes

Mark Burgess & Demosthenes Skipitaris
Oslo College

Abstract

We present a form of discretionary lock which is designed to render unreliable but frequently scheduled scripts or programs predictable even when the execution time of locked operations may grow and exceed their expected scheduling interval. We implement our locking policy with lock-unlock semantics and test them on the system administration language cfengine. The locks are controlled by too-soon and too-late parameters so that execution times can be controlled within fixed bounds even when scheduling requests occur randomly in addition to the periodic scheduling time. This has the added bonus of providing an anti-spamming functionality.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML form and PDF form.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.

  • To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 12 April 2002 aw
Technical Program
Conference Index
USENIX home