Summary

Starvation is a problem in concurrent systems in which a process (or thread) cannot gain access to the necessary resources to proceed with its execution and, therefore, cannot make any progress. Most of the time, a poorly coordinated set of scheduling instructions is the main cause of starvation; deadlock situations can also lead to starvation.

The readers-writers problem is one of the classic and most complex examples in the field of computer science, illustrating problems that might occur in a concurrent program. Through an analysis of different approaches to the readers-writers problem, you have gained insight regarding how starvation can be solved with different scheduling algorithms. Fairness is an essential element of a good scheduling algorithm, and, by making sure that the priority is distributed appropriately among different processes and threads, starvation can be eliminated.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the last of the three common problems of concurrent programming...